"I think there is a real need for a book on actual vibe coding: helping people who are not software developers—and who don’t want to become developers—learn how to use vibe coding techniques safely, effectively and responsibly to solve their problems.
This is a rich, deep topic! Most of the population of the world are never going to learn to code, but thanks to vibe coding tools those people now have a path to building custom software.
Everyone deserves the right to automate tedious things in their lives with a computer. They shouldn’t have to learn programming in order to do that. That is who vibe coding is for. It’s not for people who are software engineers already!
There are so many questions to be answered here. What kind of projects can be built in this way? How can you avoid the traps around security, privacy, reliability and a risk of over-spending? How can you navigate the jagged frontier of things that can be achieved in this way versus things that are completely impossible?
A book for people like that could be a genuine bestseller! But because three authors and the staff of two publishers didn’t read to the end of the tweet we now need to find a new buzzy term for that, despite having the perfect term for it already."
https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/1/not-vibe-coding/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #SoftwareDevelopment #Programming #VibeCoding
I'm an outsider to programming. So there's a limit to what use anything I say has.
From that perspective, I'm not sure how well vibe coding, as in guiding an llm, is going to be to someone like me that knows what they want, but not how to get there. How the hell am I going to debug the output? How would I know what to correct in the input to fix the output that way?
And the other kind of vibe coding, where it's someone just working in the zone, not trying to code as much as just create intuitively, that's not only impossible for someone that isn't fluent in a given language, it doesn't even remove the barrier of entry for non programmers either.
By the time I learn enough to use an llm to come up with software I can use, I'll have learned enough to have learned a little more and maybe cobble something together on my own anyway.
I don't believe that a single book is going to teach me enough to turn out usable software in a realistic way with an llm until they get a lot better.
So I'm not buying the concept. It just doesn't fit with what little I do know about coding
@[email protected] Well, it's not inherently extremely difficult to learn how to program. You could learn all the essential stuff from a YouTube video that is 10-hours long or a book that is 400-pages long. The difficulty comes from learning what is feasible and practical to do with computer logic. You have to get the requirements really right and knowing if the generated code is doing what is supposed to do. Syntax is relatively easy. What is difficult is to learn how to solve problems. This requires thinking like a computer scientist. Ultimately, it all depends on the level of complexity of your project.