I really don't like how religious the debate about AI has gotten here. "I feel sorry for these vibe coders" is something you tell yourself to feel superior to people who use AI.

Don't feel sorry for me, I've used vibe coding to create many things, and I still know how to program, so I'll live if it goes away.

Same, I really like the solutions one can build with LLMs and have a lot of fun working with them to improve use-cases where it actually makes sense. Its the first time since years I really enjoy coding on side-projects and take great care to give clear instructions and review and understand what LLMs build for me, except some completely irrelevant/one-shot things I entirely "vibe code".

Its gotten so bad I'm actively trying to avoid talking about this in circles like Hacker News because people get so heavily and aggressively discredited and ridiculed as if they have no idea what they are doing or are a shill for big AI companies.

I know what I'm doing and actively try to help friends and co-workers use LLMs in a sustainable way, understanding their limitations and the dangers of letting them loose without staying in the loop. Its sad that I can't talk about this without fear of being attacked, especially in communities like Hacker News that I previously valued as being very professional and open, compared to other modern social media.

Why isn't anyone talking about the bevvy of drag-and-drop no colder solutions that have already been in the market? Surely the LLMs are competing with those tools, right?

People trash LLM code as if most consumer software isn't buggy piles of half assed code.

all software if we're being honest :)

Hundreds of billions of dollars have changed hands through shitty drag-and-drop UIs, wordpress ecommerce plugins, and dreamweaver sites, lets not forget the code is there to serve a business purpose at the end of the day. Code quality is an implementation detail that may matter less over time as rewrites get easier. I love me some beatiful hand-written clean code, but clean code is not the true goal.

> clean code is not the true goal

Its not, but it does matter. LLMs, being next word guessers, perform differently with different inputs. Its not hard to imagine a feedback loop of bad code generating worse code and good code generating more good code.

My ability to get good responses from LLMs has been tied to me writing better code, docstrings, and using autoformatters.

I don't think that feedback loop is really a loop because code that doesn't actually do its job doesn't grow in popularity for long. We already have a great source of selection pressure to take care of shitty products that don't function: users and their $.

There is nothing about LLMs that make them bias towards "better" code. LLMs are every bit as good at making low effort reddit posts and writing essays for Harper's Magazine. In fact, there's a lot more shit reddit posts (and horrible student assignment github repos) than there are Harper's Magazine articles.

The only thing standing between your LLM and bad code is the quality of the prompt (including context and the hiddem OEM prompt).

I don't consider drag-and-drop UIs anywhere close to wordpress plugins. I'm not talking about writing bad code, I'm talking about being able to understand what you are creating.

there are many parts of computers I don't understand in detail, but I still get tremendous value using them and coding on top of abstractions I don't need to know the internals of.

Thats a really good comparison. Dreamweaver would be another one. You just don’t own the tool now, so it puts you at even more risk.