Vibe Coding: Taste Is The Last Frontier

 | 37 views

Lisa: “Vibe coding is Karpathy’s gift to the world. A chance for anyone to create whatever they want to!”

Jerry: “Anyone?”

Lisa: “Anyone.”

The barrier to entry for programming has dropped to zero. Consequently, the barrier to quality is skyrocketing.

If you’re building with AI, you’re walking into a minefield of new, specific anti-patterns. This is a working list of high-level issues I think are underestimated in the era of vibe coding.

Iterative Specification Problems

Prompts often skip over multiple specification steps. If you input a single prompt into Claude Code, the code will work perfectly but the first version of the application you’re building will likely not be what you want, so you’ll either have to revert or create an entirely new codebase until it’s correct.

However, providing the AI with UI design, interaction patterns, and a full design document increases the accuracy of the output by orders of magnitude. Context is the new syntax.

Undeployment

Deployment and marketing can be automated. However, requiring so many different tools often becomes a blocking factor. Many AI-developed programs never see the light of day for this reason.

Dead Internet

We see a massive scale of low-quality code on Github today. When we review applicants for roles at our company, it is obvious who uses AI mindlessly and who uses it well from a quick skim of their repository.

AI bakes in low-performance programming patterns. We must set up guardrails to avoid the codebase falling apart. Modern software increasingly lacks the human touch.

Slop-in

When buying Gemini Pro, you only have access to Gemini. This is “Slop-in.” It is unfortunate because Grok Imagine has the most expressive videos, Sora has the most realistic generation, and Claude is the best at programming.

Dysfunction Dysmorphia

By developing using AI, even technically savvy founders quickly end up with deep technical debt. You might get 10 prompts into a solution and encounter an unfixable error. This results in an emotional dysmorphia that disrupts the flow state.

This makes developers slower than manual coding and leads to fewer deployed products.

Coupled Design Thinking

Humans are inherently social animals. Ideation and development move 10x faster when sitting with another person.

Feature Creep

Adding features becomes easy. This makes the user experience too complex to be enjoyable and the developer experience unreasonable. A vibe coder needs discipline.

An app’s moat will be its simplicity.

Scaffold Obsolescence

Capabilities scaffolding may become useless with the next version of LLMs. You are building on shifting sands. Output validation over tool implementation.

Holistic Taste

The last human skill to be automated will be taste. AI will get superhuman taste right before the singularity. Until then, scalable taste-making will be the last skill to fall through.

We are entering a world where code is abundant. Taste and coherence become scarce.

So go out there and build with intent. Intent to make the world a better and more beautiful place for humanity.

Continue reading