choong pw

There is a weird trend that is happning in the software development space on Reddit. Is called “Vibe Coding”.

What is it about?

Vibe coding, as coined by Andrej Karpathy, is essentially “fully giving in to the vibes” and forgetting that code even exists. Instead of writing lines of code, you’re having a conversation with AI about what you want to build. It’s less about “how” and more about “what”. – source

To put it simply, it is all about the vibe. Meaning, building software with out the need of touching or seeing the code. All you need is describe what you want, and test the application. Iteratively describing the outcome and problem to make change accordingly.

Some are even taking a step further by using voice translation to instruct the AI. Sounds crazy? Well, with the speed and progress of LLM model, is no longer a surprise to me when someone tell me that they solve the problem with AI. Caused, I also find myself quite often will be looking into AI/LLM for answers.

Tool for vibing

On the market, there are plenty of reliable AI code editor in the market. I think Devin has set the tone for sure. Nevertheless, for the price to value – I would go for bolt.new, Cursor or Windsurf.

As a software developer, if you have not tried Cursor or Windsurf, I strongly encourage you to give it a try. Or, if you’re trying to be frugal (Frugal Engineering :P), start with playing around within the free tier. It helps to open up your world view, instead of sticking with what you’re comfortable. While is true that is not perfect yet, at the rate of the progress, it will be a blink of an eye when that happen.

Technical non-coder

The unfortunate things is that, some where in the world, there are already coder and non-coder that are using AI to build software. As more trust if given to the AI, it (I am using AI as well :P), eventually once it has proven ability to solve our problem, we’ll eventually rely more of it. By then, we might decide to forgo our way of work, and start to trust AI to do the work. Sound familiar? That is similar to how we trust the junior one they know how to do their job.

Now, that’s vibing. LOL.

While is true that this open up the door for non-coder. I personally thinks the “technical” knowledge is still a must. Ability to know what are the best practices to use, or keep secure, or pointing to the right things to fix problem. That’s why the “technical” skill is needed.

Is not the time to fear yet, we still have the upper hand.

Transitioning into the future

Therefore, I still think the OG software developer is still needed. To me, human trust is still the way to go. It is pretty scary to run a zero-downtime business with build by AI. Although, For hobby and small scale project, is totally fine.

The big question is, when? Who will be that first company that will take the leap of faith to set the example for the rest? I kinda believe there will be somebody out there is crazy enough to show that it works. And suddenly the bandwagon will start to follow.

The Takeaway

With the rate of change happening in this software development space. We need to keep updated. Being able to follow the incremental change is rewarding. Indirectly, we able to have deeper understanding what’s happening under-the-hood.

IMO, once a system become too matured, by then, it will be quite difficult to disect the system to understand it thoroughly. Take React for example, how many actually understand how React works? Just just using React to build system, but rather understands the system architecture, rendering logic, react router, etc.

If you’re resourceful enough, there are plenty of way to test or used these resources for free (hobby/small project use case). Or, read more of my blog. I’ll share more of my way of Frugal Engineering. Open up your world view, and embrace the change -Think of it like internet in the making.