8 posts tagged “vibe-coding”
As defined here - not the same thing as AI-assisted programming, though there's some overlap.
2025
Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer. Every now and then a log file or a tool I'm using will spit out a bunch of JSON that terminates unexpectedly, meaning I can't copy it into a text editor and pretty-print it to see what's going on.
The other day I got frustrated with this and had the then-new GPT-4.5 build me a pretty-printer that didn't mind incomplete JSON, using an OpenAI Canvas. Here's the chat and here's the resulting interactive.
I spotted a bug with the way it indented code today so I pasted it into Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking mode and had it make a bunch of improvements - full transcript here. Here's the finished code.
In many ways this is a perfect example of vibe coding in action. At no point did I look at a single line of code that either of the LLMs had written for me. I honestly don't care how this thing works: it could not be lower stakes for me, the worst a bug could do is show me poorly formatted incomplete JSON.
I was vaguely aware that some kind of state machine style parser would be needed, because you can't parse incomplete JSON with a regular JSON parser. Building simple parsers is the kind of thing LLMs are surprisingly good at, and also the kind of thing I don't want to take on for a trivial project.
At one point I told Claude "Try using your code execution tool to check your logic", because I happen to know Claude can write and then execute JavaScript independently of using it for artifacts. That helped it out a bunch.
I later dropped in the following:
modify the tool to work better on mobile screens and generally look a bit nicer - and remove the pretty print JSON button, it should update any time the input text is changed. Also add a "copy to clipboard" button next to the results. And add a button that says "example" which adds a longer incomplete example to demonstrate the tool, make that example pelican themed.
It's fun being able to say "generally look a bit nicer" and get a perfectly acceptable result!
Semantic Diffusion. I learned about this term today while complaining about how the definition of "vibe coding" is already being distorted to mean "any time an LLM writes code" as opposed to the intended meaning of "code I wrote with an LLM without even reviewing what it wrote".
I posted this salty note:
Feels like I'm losing the battle on this one, I keep seeing people use "vibe coding" to mean any time an LLM is used to write code
I'm particularly frustrated because for a few glorious moments we had the chance at having ONE piece of AI-related terminology with a clear, widely accepted definition!
But it turns out people couldn't be trusted to read all the way to the end of Andrej's tweet, so now we are back to yet another term where different people assume it means different things
Martin Fowler coined Semantic Diffusion in 2006 with this very clear definition:
Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined by a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely - and with it any usefulness to the term.
What's happening with vibe coding right now is such a clear example of this effect in action! I've seen the same thing happen to my own coinage prompt injection over the past couple of years.
This kind of dillution of meaning is frustrating, but does appear to be inevitable. As Martin Fowler points out it's most likely to happen to popular terms - the more popular a term is the higher the chance a game of telephone will ensue where misunderstandings flourish as the chain continues to grow.
Andrej Karpathy, who coined vibe coding, posted this just now in reply to my article:
Good post! It will take some time to settle on definitions. Personally I use "vibe coding" when I feel like this dog. My iOS app last night being a good example. But I find that in practice I rarely go full out vibe coding, and more often I still look at the code, I add complexity slowly and I try to learn over time how the pieces work, to ask clarifying questions etc.
I love that vibe coding has an official illustrative GIF now!
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York Times, Ars Technica, the Guardian and countless online discussions.
[... 1,486 words]Now you don’t even need code to be a programmer. But you do still need expertise. My recent piece on how I use LLMs to help me write code got a positive mention in John Naughton's column about vibe-coding in the Guardian this weekend.
My hunch about Apple Intelligence Siri features being delayed due to prompt injection also got a mention in the most recent episode of the New York Times Hard Fork podcast.
Anthropic API: Text editor tool (via) Anthropic released a new "tool" today for text editing. It looks similar to the tool they offered as part of their computer use beta API, and the trick they've been using for a while in both Claude Artifacts and the new Claude Code to more efficiently edit files there.
The new tool requires you to implement several commands:
view- to view a specified file - either the whole thing or a specified rangestr_replace- execute an exact string match replacement on a filecreate- create a new file with the specified contentsinsert- insert new text after a specified line numberundo_edit- undo the last edit made to a specific file
Providing implementations of these commands is left as an exercise for the developer.
Once implemented, you can have conversations with Claude where it knows that it can request the content of existing files, make modifications to them and create new ones.
There's quite a lot of assembly required to start using this. I tried vibe coding an implementation by dumping a copy of the documentation into Claude itself but I didn't get as far as a working program - it looks like I'd need to spend a bunch more time on that to get something to work, so my effort is currently abandoned.
This was introduced as in a post on Token-saving updates on the Anthropic API, which also included a simplification of their token caching API and a new Token-efficient tool use (beta) where sending a token-efficient-tools-2025-02-19 beta header to Claude 3.7 Sonnet can save 14-70% of the tokens needed to define tools and schemas.
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
Online discussions about using Large Language Models to help write code inevitably produce comments from developers who’s experiences have been disappointing. They often ask what they’re doing wrong—how come some people are reporting such great results when their own experiments have proved lacking?
[... 5,179 words]Will the future of software development run on vibes? I got a few quotes in this piece by Benj Edwards about vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for when you prompt an LLM to write code, accept all changes and keep feeding it prompts and error messages and see what you can get it to build.
Here's what I originally sent to Benj:
I really enjoy vibe coding - it's a fun way to play with the limits of these models. It's also useful for prototyping, where the aim of the exercise is to try out an idea and prove if it can work.
Where vibe coding fails is in producing maintainable code for production settings. I firmly believe that as a developer you have to take accountability for the code you produce - if you're going to put your name to it you need to be confident that you understand how and why it works - ideally to the point that you can explain it to somebody else.
Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly a terrible idea. Most of the work we do as software engineers is about evolving existing systems, and for those the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial.
For experiments and low-stake projects where you want to explore what's possible and build fun prototypes? Go wild! But stay aware of the very real risk that a good enough prototype often faces pressure to get pushed to production.
If an LLM wrote every line of your code but you've reviewed, tested and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book - that's using an LLM as a typing assistant.
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. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard.
I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. 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.
It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.