The Vergecast: Vibe coding through the GPT-5 mess →
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Fascinating segment on The Vergecast this week on vibe coding.
One of the promises of AI is this idea that software will become commoditized and anyone can just whip up their own personalized app on a dime. Based on my experiences of getting genuinely useful apps with only a little bit of prompting, I've been agreeing with this statement as well. On the Vergecast, they set out to test that theory by vibe coding as people without any programming experience. ChatGPT made something, but nobody thought it went particularly well for them.
The fact that they couldn't get the apps to work according to plan isn't the suprising or interesting part to me. I've always had to spend a bit of time iterating on the prompt and doing back and forth to get a useful output. What was interesting was how they kept saying that ChatGPT was talking to them as if they were already programmers. For example, going through next steps or explaining the code. This was overwhelming for them and seemed to me to get in the way of their usage of the LLM.
I hadn't really ever thought about this because I already know the programmer speak, and so for me having ChatGPT use that language is actually helpful. But without that base of knowledge everyone ended up confused at what was going on. And furthermore, knowing that their apps weren't working as expected, they didn't have the language to communicate back in what ways to iterate on the code to move forward.
Considering the training data certainly scraped all the open source readme files and programming tutorials in the world, it makes sense that all of the specialized words and language around programming is baked into the models when it comes to discussing about programming. It seems plausible that you could improve the helpfulness of such vibe coded software with training data aimed at non programmers, but I think that even if you can make an app without knowing coding there's just no replacement for good solid programming fundamentals.