Vibe codding... I don't get it!

[Tibi]

I’m deep into shaders and three.js, and honestly, there’s no “end” to this road. The possibilities feel limitless—you can literally build full games like the ones we play on PC. This stuff is hard; it’s not typical web development. And somehow I love it. It’s just math and numbers. The weird part? I’m not even “good” at math, but my brain clicks with low-level coding. Shaders run on the GPU—there’s nothing more low-level than that.

This is a small experiment with fire particles and an attractor that pulls them in. Drag the green dot and play with it:

https://fwdapps.net/l/fire/ - credits go to Simondev!

I spoke with a veteran who has ~20 years in this space, and even he says he still feels like a beginner after two decades of doing shaders and 3D in the browser.

AI helps, for sure—but if I lean on it too much, I get lost and it takes the wheel. I’m definitely not the only one who’s felt that. Doing this work shows how complex the fundamentals are. For example, when you see a model on screen, you’re moving through multiple spaces, each with its own transformation matrices—basically, its own little realm. That’s the kind of thing you have to understand, not just prompt.

So I’m wondering about the future of “code with AI.” This is where the web is headed, but no matter how good your prompts are, there are concepts—like this attractor and this is a simple example, you need to truly grasp. If a beginner doesn’t understand 99% of what’s happening under the hood, what will future web experiences look like? Something doesn’t quite add up.

I’m just trying to understand the mindset of a CEO who would do anything to get rid of employees and replace them with AI agents. How exactly is the world supposed to function if it seems like nobody needs to learn anything anymore, and we just let AI do everything? It makes no sense to me.

I bet the NVIDIA CEO who said that ther is no need to learn programming anymore, even though they hire talented developers like crazy, is constantly researching and coming up with new ideas himself, not just letting AI handle everything. When that much money is at stake, of course, they’ll say almost anything to make more billions.

What I really don’t get is how someone who doesn’t actually understand a field or know how to build something in it can expect to create it just by talking to a prompt. In my mind, that simply doesn’t work. Maybe I’m not seeing it the right way, but it still feels unrealistic.

Let me give you a practical example. I’ve been building WordPress plugins for about 20 years now. These days, getting a plugin approved on Envato or WordPress.org is honestly harder than getting a job. If you don’t believe me, give it a try. There are so many little details behind the scenes that you need to understand — not to mention security concerns and a whole list of things that someone who’s never dealt with these challenges wouldn’t even know exist.

With these plugins, if you don’t get it right on the first try, you’ll get a hard reject — and that’s it, goodbye. I worked on a WordPress theme for 16 months, and it got a hard rejection in just one minute. Imagine that. That’s how tough it is!

That’s why I just can’t wrap my head around how someone with zero knowledge could build something just by prompting AI. If this is the direction we’re heading — where AI does everything and people don’t need to actually learn or understand anything — then who’s going to know how things really work under the hood or if they are what they should be? How will they even know if something is good or secure?

Honestly, the future looks pretty bad if you ask me. The billionaires will get everything, and the rest will be left to struggle. And on top of that, nobody seems to talk seriously about copyright. AI can scrape my code and use it without any legal consequences, and it’s the same with stock footage.

Okay, I’ll stop here. I don’t understand the direction we are heading to

[Lawrence3DPK]

There’s no particles

[Tibi]

Try refreshing the page, works fine for me

[phil_crowther]

I get particles. PC Intel NVidia Chrome.

Regarding AI, one big problem is that it uses material that has been created by others. For example, I read that ChatGPT gets 50% of it’s material from Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is going broke because people are using ChatGPT rather than Wikipedia and because ChatGPT is not compensating Wikipedia. So you can see where that is heading. AI needs people to create the source material which it makes available to others. But if AI refuses to compensate those creators, then they will either stop creating or start hiding new material and AI will stagnate. And we will all suffer.

Also I have read that programmers in companies that have tried using AI to create code have discovered that it takes more time because they have to spend more time tracking down all the errors in the AI code (and that’s just the obvious errors - not the hidden ones).

Don’t get me started on the huge resource costs of AI and crypto (which is just gambling).

AI has a place. But it needs to compensate the creators and it needs to make a profit - neither of which currently matter to the rich investors and gamblers who are pouring money into AI. Eventually AI will hit a wall and it will all collapse. In the meantime, I am doing my small part by disabling AI wherever possible. The answers I get from here, from Stack and from Wikipedia are much better than anything I get from AI.

[manthrax]

^ from 2020.. so.. pre modern llms.

The exploitation has been there since the beginning of capitalism.

GPT’s have mechanized it.

I’m not disagreeing with your observations @Tibi .. just trying to contextualize it.

[PavelBoytchev]

The amount of AI generated stuff is increasing much faster than human generated stuff. And it is already a known phenomenon that AI uses AI generated sources. It is like washing clothes day after day with the same water without draining it.

I have experienced having my code being stolen by AI and then reincarnated in other people’s code who used vibe coding or AI support. But I have posted my code online and I was aware that other people and unpeople could use it. My only sadness was that AI broke the authorship chain. Anyway, I contact that person and he was so kind to add a reference to the original code.

To be honest, the AI version of my code was not a verbatim copy, it was like a mixture of my code and somebody else’s code.

To master the use of AI is like mastering any other tool: first learn how to use it, then learn how not to use it.

[Tibi]

Ok, guys, but how will the world function if the future generations are advised by their elders not to learn anything anymore because AI will do it for them…

About vibe coding: I’m trying to create a realistic sun, but my skills aren’t there yet. Even though I’ve made some progress with chatgp, I feel no satisfaction—just frustration, and I’m not sure why. That’s a big deal, because creating things and feeling personally rewarded used to drive my passion for this work. Now that the passion is fading—even though AI lets me build far more advanced things than I could before—I worry future generations will work like robots, doing tasks they don’t really understand. To me, that’s a recipe for madness and disaster, where nothing holds real value anymore.

What I don’t understand is how a major CEO—like NVIDIA’s—can say something like, “Don’t learn to code; it’s useless,” while their company is still hunting for talented developers. Even if a prompt could get you what you want, how would you know what to ask for if you have no idea how things are built? That contradiction makes no sense to me.

About stolen code: I’ve built around 50 plugins for WordPress and vanilla JavaScript, and almost all of them are floating around on pirate sites for $2 or even free. The worst part is that a few days ago I saw a plugin almost identical to mine—and there’s nothing I can do about it.

When I release a new product, the first “sale” is always on a pirate site listing it for pennies.

Anyway, I genuinely worry about future generations. I have a 14-year-old daughter, and I don’t even know what to tell her anymore. She’s teaching herself Blender, but this idea that we shouldn’t learn anything anymore just doesn’t compute for me. As time goes on, I only get more confused.

[manthrax]

When I was a kid, I helped my mom sort punch cards for one of her statistics classes…

At a time later on, it was a requirement to know x86 assembly to do 3d on the pc…

Later than that.. it was a requirement to know java to do 3d on mobile..

Now, anyone with a text editor (and perhaps an LLM like gpt) can write a singlepage threejs app that runs on most devices.

Does anyone feel like they have lost something of great value by never learning x86 and java?

The list of tech that I have learned and forgotten, dwarfs what I currently know…

(people writing drivers and stuff still need to know x86/arm/asm etc. etc. but those folks aren’t really hanging out in this forum so much afaik.. maybe like 4 or 5 of em.. who view this as a hobby.. )

Tech evolves and changes…

[Tibi]

Still confused

[manthrax]

vibe-coding-summary.txt (2.3 KB)

[Tibi]

So you’re saying that fundamentals are not important anymore?

[manthrax]

I think it’s subjective. Some people Want to know fundamentals… others just want to download/vibecode a plugin/app.

[grml]

“Vibe coding” is supposed to be something a non-programmer does for fun to create toy apps, not for automatic generation of enterprise business apps.

Actual programmers use LLMs as advanced auto-complete, for scaffolding, or as a rubber duck. It’s a new generation of tools that can make my job easier if I know how to use them effectively. Talking to an LLM can be faster and more effective than reading static documentation, and it’s not as anxiety-inducing as asking something on StackOverflow where you had to deal with all the dickheads. I’m not afraid of being replaced by AI or that my skills might atrophy – it’s quite the opposite, actually.

I mostly have a lot of fun generating images and videos, for my own amusement or for friends and family. Made a custom logo for my mate’s Harley Davidson, designed by hand and rendered by AI. Printed a large sticker, looks awesome and I wouldn’t have been able to make it look that good without AI.

I have my own AI rig for everyting though. I refuse to use and pay for their closed, censored, moralizing, inflexible, privacy-raping, over-hyped cloud offerings.

[Tibi]

@grml

I totally agree. The thing is, the CEOs of the biggest tech companies in the world are basically saying there’s no need to learn anything anymore except how to type a prompt. This is why I believe future generations will have a really hard time figuring things out.
Creating an app is hard — it’s not just about code. It’s about the entire process. We all know how difficult it is to put everything together, even a simple one; the entire process requires a whole range of skills and experience… How are you supposed to do that if you don’t know anything? That’s what I don’t understand, and it seems the young devs adopt this approach with no issue, let’s build 100 apps per month but I don’t understand what I did…what the f*ck it dose not matter if the client has issues with it i will just abndon it and create 100 more, the thing is to have profit, right?

One of my plugins is a video player with a ton of features, so many that I forgot some of them,m even though I implemented it — https://fwdapps.net/p/uvp/ — which I first built in 2012. Since then, I’ve released so many updates that I’ve lost count of all the features and fixes I’ve added. Most of them came from client requests.

I’ve sold this item about 10,000 licences since it’s release and offerd it for free to more than 50k users over it’s existence. My clients have always been happy because I take the time to fix issues and add improvements and new features because I understand what I’m doing.
Now, I can only imagine someone with no idea what they’re doing trying to implement something like the Google IMA SDK — it just wouldn’t work.
I’m absolutely sure this current madness will either stop or eventually find some balance. Otherwise, the world is going to be a mess. And this isn’t just about software development — it affects everything.

About paying I do use chatrgpt to be honest I like it but improving on what I already know and it did increasd my productivyt a lot allowing me to create things that I could not have done without it, so 25$ per month are more than fair.

[grml]

The price is the least of my concerns. I don’t even mind them scraping the whole world to train their models with the data, they should be able to do that. Information wants to be free.

I do have an issue with them selling the data back to those who provided it in the first place, and claiming copyright on the models and/or the output. That is scumbag behavior. The models should be freely available to anyone, in the public domain, as well as the unedited output of the models. They shouldn’t be allowed to hoover every crumb of data off the planet and put access to it behind a paywall.

Fucking Suno in particular pisses me off. They scraped every piece of music ever made and now sells the results back to musicians, and you have to pay them if you want to use the result for anything.

[Tibi]

There was and still is a marketplace called AudioJungle, before AI authors created tracks and made a living out it, now it is just a place for AI to train, and the users make a few bucks here and there, the ownners Envato made probably a fortune…

The stock footage industry is dead for sure, the subscription model and AI killed it!

[Tibi]

I vibe codding this sun Just kidding if you want to lose your mind try to vibe code this sun!

I used ChatGPT to help boost my productivity and refine the details. I made this in about six hours, but I used it knowing exactly what I wanted to do and understanding the code well enough that the small details didn’t slow me down anymore.

Start

[phil_crowther]

A CEO will always go for the cheapest solution.

But a CTO will face some challenges.

They might be able to use AI to create a simple code snippet to perform a simple task. But code rarely exists in a vacuum. Unlike works of art, you cannot ask AI to create a program in a certain style. Each company has different requirements and will have to have someone who can integrate the new code into the existing company programs and insure that the AI has not created code with security risks and to track down and fix the inevitable errors.

If the task is so simple that AI can do it, you can probably hire a regular programmer who will do it faster and better for less - even if the AI generated code snippet is free.

If the CEO wants cutting-edge code, then AI will probably be unable to generate any usable code because there is not enough source material. However, smart programmers can use AI to help them understand the concepts required to write the cutting-edge code.

So, if I were a CTO, I would still want to have experienced programmers on my staff who understand the existing company systems and protocols and I would not see any value to hiring full-time “vibe coders”. And I can’t imagine anyone putting that they are “vibe coder” on their resume.

But I could be wrong. I have seen CTOs almost bring companies to bankruptcy by replacing huge parts of their existing systems with “software packages” and trying to save cost by not running both systems in parallel until they were sure that the package really worked as advertised.

And AI companies are doing their best to convince everyone that they can replace all their employee with AI-driven robots. So I can imagine that a lot of CTOs, CFOs, etc. are all under pressure from CEOs to do just that. (Been there!) But I think real-life experiences are slowly demonstrating that AI makes things worse, not better.

PS I can’t stop staring at the sun! The solar filaments are pretty cool. Where can I steal the code for my solar system projects? (Seriously, I have been thinking about viewing the sun from Mercury and using a snippet of the music from the flare scene in the movie 1917 - the crescendo where he arrives at the burning building and the static burning noise thereafter.)

[Tibi]

@phil_crowther

or my solar system

Here is the full code https://fwdapps.net/sun.zip if you want to add in to a simulation where it actually moves around, you will need to make some code changes. Some of the transformations are in the world space… it can be adjusted though.

I didn’t arrange the code too well, so I apologize for that. I just wanted to finish it as quickly as possible. I’ll probably use it on my landing page — I already have an idea in mind, but we’ll see.

The way I see the future is this: we’ll use AI, but you still need a solid understanding of your craft. Without that, there’s no way to keep up with AI and hold everything together.

For example, with this sun, I built each element one step at a time: first the sun itself, then the glow, then the rays, and finally the flares. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve and understood the environment I was working in.

If someone were to take this code, strip out a few parts, and throw it all together without understanding what they’re doing, it would be like playing the lottery — just plain stupid, if you ask me, and in this cas,e even though the idea and code are complex don’t compare with a full wbesite for example with a more complicated logic not some generic template!

I’m absolutely sure companies will realize this sooner or later: we will still need specialists, even in the age of super AI. To work effectively with AI, you must know your field inside out. You can’t be a real specialist unless you do your homework.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and these very rich people actually want to get rid of humanity and rule the world — just like in the movie Elysium with Matt Damon. Either way, we need regulations on AI, because at this point it can steal anything from anywhere, but nobody seams to care about this at this point.

[manthrax]

you cannot ask AI to create a program in a certain style

you absolutely can and it works quite well.

For my personal projects I have gpt instructed to write code in my own terrible coding style.. think “boomer vanilla, short variable names, prefer fast code.. preallocate everything.. use mutable structures over functional code where appropriate for performance”

but for more public facing/commercial stuff I use more default rules, or have it mimic the style of whatever codebase I’m working in… (which is what the coding llms try to do by default.) If you give them a shitty codebase they will write shitty code. if you give them a NASA codebase, they will try to write NASA code. (i can’t speak to how effective that is, because I’m not a NASA programmer )

I’m not neccesarily disagreeing with your points.. just.. none of this is black and white.