Have I misunderstood the term vibe coder? I thought it meant people who weren’t good at coding. I thought Stark’s whole thing was that he’s a genius. Is he notoriously bad at software but good with hardware or something?
vibe coding is when you let an llm write almost all your code, taking its output at face value. tony stark in the films just vaguely describes to his computer what he wants and trusts that it does the right thing.
I think the underlying understanding is that Tony wrote the AI he’s asking to write the code. So, in effect, the AI he built is a form of scripting. Rather than spending his time churning out code, the AI will churn out code that’s up to his standard because he wrote the AI.
This was my understanding, too. Dude created his own hardware and software and then hand rolled an AI so he had more time to spend saving the world instead of hunched over a laptop. Anything he tells his own AI to do would probably be trivial to him to write himself but would take us months.
From my understanding a vibe coder is someone who builds software using mainly AI generated code. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad coder, but often the code generated by AI is just hard to process at this scale and people will have no clue what exactly is going on in their project.
An irrelevant but interesting take is that this applies as an analogue to a lot of stuff in electronics related space.
It is harder to receive data than to transmit it, because you need to do things like:
match your receiver’s frequency with that of the transmission (which might be minutely different from the agreed upon frequency), to understand it
know how long the data will be, before feeding into digital variables, or you might combine multiple messages or leave out some stuff without realising
this gets even harder when it is wireless, because now, you have noise, which is often, valid communication among other devices
Getting back to code, you now need to get in the same “wavelength” as the one who wrote the code, at the time they wrote the code.
So? Some of the people pushing out ai slop would be perfectly capable of writing their own llm out of widely available free tools. Contrary to popular belief, they are not complex pieces of software, just extremely data hungry. Does not mean they magically understand the code output by the llm when it spits out something.
given that expert systems are pretty much just a big ball of if-then statements, then he might be considered to have written the app. Just with way more extra steps.
I feel like you’re really forgetting the lore. Do you not remember the iconic “TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BULD THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BIX OF SCRAPS.” He built a compact arc reactor in a cave. The other man’s reply as to why he couldn’t do it in a lab with more scientists and equipment was “I’m not Tony Stark.”
Have I misunderstood the term vibe coder? I thought it meant people who weren’t good at coding. I thought Stark’s whole thing was that he’s a genius. Is he notoriously bad at software but good with hardware or something?
vibe coding is when you let an llm write almost all your code, taking its output at face value. tony stark in the films just vaguely describes to his computer what he wants and trusts that it does the right thing.
I think the underlying understanding is that Tony wrote the AI he’s asking to write the code. So, in effect, the AI he built is a form of scripting. Rather than spending his time churning out code, the AI will churn out code that’s up to his standard because he wrote the AI.
This was my understanding, too. Dude created his own hardware and software and then hand rolled an AI so he had more time to spend saving the world instead of hunched over a laptop. Anything he tells his own AI to do would probably be trivial to him to write himself but would take us months.
From my understanding a vibe coder is someone who builds software using mainly AI generated code. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad coder, but often the code generated by AI is just hard to process at this scale and people will have no clue what exactly is going on in their project.
if they build software using mainly ai generated code, then they are a bad coder
I’ve tried this on personal projects, but not work projects.
My verdict:
To be a good vibe coder, one must first be a good coder.
Vibe coding is faster to draft up and POC, longer to debug and polish. Not as much time savings as one might think.
exactly, you can only really verify the code if you were capable of writing it in the first place.
And it’s an old well known fact that reading code is much harder than writing it.
An irrelevant but interesting take is that this applies as an analogue to a lot of stuff in electronics related space.
Getting back to code, you now need to get in the same “wavelength” as the one who wrote the code, at the time they wrote the code.
i like the analogy
Exactly how I feel about it as well.
Even if you’re the one that built, programmed, and trained the AI when nothing else like it existed?
So? Some of the people pushing out ai slop would be perfectly capable of writing their own llm out of widely available free tools. Contrary to popular belief, they are not complex pieces of software, just extremely data hungry. Does not mean they magically understand the code output by the llm when it spits out something.
Stark would have developed their own way of training their AI. It wouldn’t be an LLM in the first place.
and he stil wouldn’t understand its output. Because as we clearly see, he doesn’t even try to look at it.
What if it were just a really big Expert system?
That’s usually the thing that you call AI players or COM players in computer games.
given that expert systems are pretty much just a big ball of if-then statements, then he might be considered to have written the app. Just with way more extra steps.
Javis, his AI assistant, did all the work.
Except that he made Jarvis. Meaning he understands perfectly his tool’s abilities and limitations… Which vibe coders don’t.
Yes, but he also programmed Jarvis… So…
I feel like you’re really forgetting the lore. Do you not remember the iconic “TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BULD THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BIX OF SCRAPS.” He built a compact arc reactor in a cave. The other man’s reply as to why he couldn’t do it in a lab with more scientists and equipment was “I’m not Tony Stark.”
https://youtu.be/9foB2z_OVHc