Comment by losvedir

> Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV

Anyone who has spent time working with LLMs knows that the LinkedIn-style vibecoding where someone writes prompts and hits enter until they ship an app doesn't work.

I've had some fun trying to coax different LLMs into writing usable small throwaway apps. It's hilarious in a way to the contrast between what an experienced developer sees coming out of LLMs and what the LinkedIn and Twitter influencers are saying. If you know what you're doing and you have enough patience you really can get an LLM to do a lot of the things you want, but it can require a lot of handholding, rejecting bad ideas, and reviewing.

In my experience, the people pushing "vibecoding" content are influencers trying to ride the trend. They use the trend to gain more followers, sell courses, get the attention of a class of investors desperate to deploy cash, and other groups who want to believe vibecoding is magic.

I also consider them a vocal minority, because I don't think they represent the majority of LLM users.

fwiw, copilots licence only explicitly permits using its suggestions the way you say.

putting everyone using the generated outputs into a sort of unofficial grey market: even when using first-party tools. Which is weird.

I'll give you a basic example where it saved me a ton of time to vibe code instead of doing it myself, and I believe it would hold true for anyone.

Creating ~50 different types of calculators in JavaScript. Gemini can bang out in seconds what would take me far longer (and it's reasonable at basic tailwind style front-end design to boot). A large amount of work smashed down to a couple of days of cumulative instruction + testing in my spare time. It takes far long to think of how I want something to function in this example than it does for Gemini to successfully produce it. This is a use case scenario where something like Gemini 3 is exceptionally capable, and far exceeds the capability requirements needed to produce a decent outcome.

Do I want my next operating system vibe coded by Gemini 3? Of course not. Can it knock out front-end JavaScript tasks trivially? Yes, and far faster than any human could ever do it. Classic situation of using a tool for things it's particularly well suited.

Here's another one. An SM-24 Geophone + Raspberry PI 5 + ADC board. Hey Gemini / GPT, I need to build bin files from the raw voltage figures + timestamps, then using flask I need a web viewer + conversion on the geophone velocity figures for displacement and acceleration. Properly instructed, they'll create a highly functional version of that with some adjustments/iteration in 15-30 minutes. I basically had them recreate REW RTA mode for my geophone velocity data, and there's no way a person could do it nearly as fast. It requires some checking and iteration, and that's assumed in the comparison.

Finding this comment interesting, parent comment didn't suggest any past association but it seemingly uses project reference as pivot point to do various outgroup counter signaling / neg bun?

I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to https://handmade.network as their manifesto made multiple rounds here, was discussed at length and far more obviously related to "handmade movement" remark than your org.

I think you may have confused parent commenter's "Handmade software movement" types comment to Handmade cities which doesn't seem related to me other than the common word handmade

I might missing some context. Just to check my understanding: HMC and Bun aren't a good match anymore because Bun devs use LLM/AI tooling more than HMC? Basically to really level up a system is incompatible these tools? (IYHO)

Thank you! I appreciated how you wrote up this clarifying.

I like that the filepilot download is 2.1MB. That really illustrates the difference between handmade style stuff and well, most other stuff.

back in my day we used to write code on punch cards.

more people should have such a healthy approach not only to llms but to life in general. Same reason I partake less and less in online discourse: its so tribal and filled with anger that its just not worth it to contribute anymore. Learning how to be in the middle did wonders to me as a programmer and I think as a person as well.

Yep. And there's a lot of people making use of LLMs in both coding and learning/searching doing exactly that.

One of my favorite things is describing a bug to an LLM and asking it to find possible causes. It's helped track something down many times, even if I ultimately coded the fix.

Bespoke handcrafted ethically sourced all natural cruelty free source code

I can't speak as much about the last two examples, but writing a giant parser file is pretty common in Zig from what I've seen. Here's Zig's own parser, for example[1]. I'm also not sure what you mean by memory unsafe, since all slices have bounds checks. It also looks like this uses an arena allocator, so lifetime tracking is pretty simple (dump everything onto the allocator, and copy over the result at the end). Granted, I could be misunderstanding the code, but that's the read I get of it.

[1] https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/commit/be9649f4ea5a32fd...