Other than for your own pet projects, almost all of what you said has no place for "vibe engineering" / or "vibe coding" on serious software engineering products that are needed in life and death situations.
And not all "production-grade, hundred billion dollar systems" are that critical. Like, Claude Code as we all know is clearly vibe-coded and is already a 10-billion (and rapidly increasing!) dollar system. Google Search and various Meta apps meet those criteria and people are already using LLMs on that code, and will soon be "vibe coding" as I described it.
AWS meets that criteria and has already had an LLM-caused outage! But that's not stopping them from doing even more AI coding. In fact I bet they will invest in more validation suites instead, because those are a good idea anyways. After all, all the cloud providers have been having outages long before the age of LLMs.
The thing most people are missing is that code is cheap, and so automated validations are cheap, and you get more bang for the buck by throwing more code in the form of extensive tests and validations at it than human attention.
Edited to add: I think I can rephrase the last line better thus: you get more bang for the buck by throwing human attention at extensive automated tests and validations of the code rather than at the code itself.
>> I think all coding will become vibe coding...
Nope. First of all, Let's get the true definition of "vibe coding" completely clear from the first mention of it from Karpathy. From [0]:
>> "There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." [0]
>> "I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away." [0]
So with the true definition, you are arguing that all coding will become "vibe-coding" and that includes in mission critical software. Not even Karpathy would go as far as that and he's not even sure that he even knows that it works..."mostly".
Responsibility is what cannot be vibe-coded. The major cloud providers and the tech companies that own them have contracts with their customers which is worth billions to their revenue. That is why they cannot afford to "vibe-code" infra that causes them to lose $100M+ a hour when a key part of their infra goes down or stops working.
So:
> Like, Claude Code as we all know is clearly vibe-coded and is already a 10-billion (and rapidly increasing!) dollar system.
That is not vibe-coded anymore and it is maintained by software engineers who look at the code at all times, daily before merging any changes; AI generated or not.
> Google Search and various Meta apps meet those criteria and people are already using LLMs on that code, and will soon be "vibe coding" as I described it.
Nope. As Karpathy described it, that would never happen and human software engineers will be reviewing the agents code all the times. But that would not be vibe-coding would it?
> AWS meets that criteria and has already had an LLM-caused outage!
Are they vibe coding now after that outage? I bet that they are not.
> After all, all the cloud providers have been having outages long before the age of LLMs.
That isn't the point. Someone was held to account for the outages and had to explain why it happened.
They will lose trust + billions of dollars if they admitted that they vibe-coded their entire infra and had 0 engineers who don't understand why it went wrong.
> The thing most people are missing is that code is cheap, and so automated validations are cheap, and you get more bang for the buck by throwing more code in the form of extensive tests and validations at it than human attention.
The risk is amplified with the companies reputation on the line and it's very expensive to lose. I'm talking in the hundreds of billions annually and a 10% loss of global revenues due to constant outages can cause the stock to fall.
So you do understand the contradiction you said earlier about AWS indeed strengthens my point on the limitations on vibe coding especially on mission critical software?
> So this is still engineering, but it will be vibe coding in the sense that we almost never look at the code, we just look at the results.
It is pretty clear that "giving in to the vibes" is simply "looking at the results." But I'm predicting that it is going to be an engineering discipline in itself. Note that I started with (emphasis added):
> I think all coding will become vibe coding but it will be no less an engineering discipline.
And then I went on to explain the engineering aspect as extensive technical validation. There is a role called Validation Engineers in many industries including semiconductors, and I posit that it's going to be everybody's primary role soon.
> Responsibility is what cannot be vibe-coded. ... That isn't the point. Someone was held to account for the outages and had to explain why it happened.
I never implied a loss of accountability anywhere, but I completely agree, and have posted about it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319851
That is still orthogonal to vibe-coding. People have been sloppy without vibe-coding and were still held accountable. The flaw is assuming all vibe-coding is slop, because my point is that validation will matter much more than the code, which means soon we may never look at the code. In fact, extensive automated validation is probably a better signal for accountability than "We looked at the code very, very carefully."
There are people who write software for hedge funds, quant firms, aviation and defense systems, data center providers, major telecom services used by hospitals and emergency services and semiconductor firms and the big oil and energy companies and that is NOT "almost no-one" and these companies see and make hundreds of billions of dollars a year on average.
This is even before me mentioning big tech.
Perhaps the work most here on this site are doing is not serious enough that can be totally vibe-coded and are toy projects and bring in close to $0 for the company to not care.
What I am talking about is the software that is responsible for being the core revenue driver of the business and it being also mission critical.
E.g. there are 100s of millions of lines of code in a car, but the vast majority of that concerns non-critical parts like the dashboard; the primary Engine Control Unit has like ~10K LoC, and the number of people that work on it are proportionally smaller.
And if you think that is very well-designed code, here's something to help you sleep better: https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/384mjp/nasa_softwar...