Vibe coding: Empowering and imprisoning

> You can’t make anything truly radical with it. By definition, LLMs are trained on what has come before. In addition to being already-discovered territory, existing code is buggy and broken and sloppy and, as anyone who has ever written code knows, absolutely embarrassing to look at.

I don't understand this argument. I mean the same applies for books. All books teach you what has come before. Nobody says "You can't make anything truly radical with books". Radical things are built by people after reading those books. Why can't people build radical things after learning or after being assisted by LLMs?

>> You can’t make anything truly radical with it. By definition, LLMs are trained on what has come before. In addition to being already-discovered territory, existing code is buggy and broken and sloppy and, as anyone who has ever written code knows, absolutely embarrassing to look at.

> I don't understand this argument. I mean the same applies for books. All books teach you what has come before. Nobody says "You can't make anything truly radical with books". Radical things are built by people after reading those books.

Books share concepts expressed by people understanding those concepts (or purporting to do so) in a manner which is relatable to the reader. This is achievable due to a largely shared common lived experience as both parties are humans.

In short, people reason, learn, remember, and can relate with each other.

> Why can't people build radical things after learning ...

They absolutely can and often do.

> ... or after being assisted by LLMs?

Therein lies the problem. LLMs are not assistants.

They are statistical token (text) document generators. That's it.

> They are statistical token (text) document generators. That's it.

I don’t know why people post this as some kind of slam dunk.

At the end of the day, it's true? There are times where that suffices, and times where it doesn't.