People enjoy different things. Its not strange. Treating it as strange is kinda insulting, so I'd recommend that you rethink how you phrase this.
Yes! Which means that the argument frequently seen here of "AI is terrible because everyone hates using it" is not valid.
Seems like the same old story. Rude people defending other rude people so that they can collectively continue to justify their own rudeness. Usually with arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And usually using a fresh account.
While interests have a wide variety of norms, communication has a much smaller space of shared norms, and "strange" implies a negative value judgement in most of them. I'm comfortable with my comment.
I feel that the fact that people feel the need to pile on people who enjoy writing code is a problematic trend on HN, whereas telling them to maybe consider other peoples' priorities and preferences is not. The paradox of tolerance is apt here.
> Strange implies a negative value judgement
It sounds like you've internalized some negativity around being "not-normal" -- how I would define "strange".
In a society of vice, greed, and perfidy, acting nice for no reason is "strange".
So, as many things that can be compared and have a "normal" can be strange.
Deviant implies negativity, but I would say pacifists are "deviants".
Any negativity with "strange" has to come with context.
Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.
From my anecdotal experience it absolutely is more fun (I yearn for the early days when this happened more), but it's also extremely inefficient and slow when you need to ship a product, and increasingly difficult when your code has to run on high-level platforms (like the web, mobile, etc). Building frameworks and re-inventing wheels is one of my favorite things to do, but it rarely makes business sense to do that unless you're in a very niche space.
Been working on my own ORM / Framework for 15 years at this point. Had a laundry list of things I wanted to finish that would have taken me another 3-5 years and it was done in about a month. Still controlled every function name, every preference, every comment, even went in and manually rewrote function names and adjust how it did things. At one point I had to manually intervene in an algorithm because the AI fucked it up badly. Most of it's first try was garbage. It's true. But still in the end I didn't really have to type it out. Sometimes you've been living and breathing a code base for so long that you can just skim the function names and their contents and be content. So that's what happened. It only took a few sessions and I was done.
So it's over. Not only is it "done" exactly to my preferences with exactly all the right method names and configurations I have always dreamed of. It also has 100% unit test coverage AND on top of that I have a suite of benchmarks profiling it against similar libraries in order to provide an honest assessment.
This would simply not be possible before AI. It's a little bittersweet that my ongoing project is "done" but now I'm building things with it. So it's not all bad.
I encourage you to stop calling it "vibecoding" when you are, I presume a long time software engineer, and shove your hand into the guts of the code and force it into the submission sometimes.
> just built everything else you needed on your own
Exactly what I'm doing. Made my own task manager. Have my own harness. Have my own fork of $browser. Whatever.
I'm okay with this.
That seems like an solution to the kind of programming that is piping together little pieces of business logic with all kinds of different APIs and services all over. I agree that AI is helpful to distill the piles of documentation and things to learn.
But I mostly enjoy a different kind of programming where you work on a big complicated problem / business logic that sits mostly within the bounds of a defined language setting. The craft of finding more and more elegant, far-reaching, and correct abstractions, and then being able to build things out confidently from those well found abstractions is, in my mind, the greatest joy, and also what AI seems the worst at.
> AI is a "solution" to that
Reading AI documentation/notes is better then? Or is the implication that you can oneshot all apps/code without reading the claudespeak that explains it?
Not necessarily one-shot, but still in a fraction of the time it would take you to manually wade through the implementation.
This was pretty much already the case half a year ago, with some more patience and tolerance for worse UX.
Nowadays we're getting to the point where the autonomous implementation can deliver UX like software produced by teams at Apple or Google and the like, and with optimized performance.
i'll have a specific technical architecture in mind -- API specs, a list of cloud services, a general idea about how code should be broken into modules. i'll write it all out and let the pieces get filled in by AI.
it's not really 'vibe coding' as the term was originally envisioned where you just describe a top-level goal (e.g., "make me a new version of minecraft. no mistakes please."). it's a different level of abstraction where the models are primarily doing implementation and not design.
for me this lets me do the fun parts of designing software BUT i don't have to slog through documentation and learn a bunch of DSLs to get it going.