Vibe Coding Is a Problem

and and they hit problems, and they're trying to debug it, and they're they're typing in. And they're reading the replies.

here. And I go, oh, that's what a race condition in this JS, and Wes and we solve that. And there are so many different things you can learn Mhmm. They're just building in JS well. People are making fun software, they're building little games and whatnot. And I think that will will die down as

It might be because we have a race condition

Yeah. Totally. Love it, hate it. What do you think?

just building these silly little throwaway applications. So Yeah. Us WordPress Devs it's surprisingly you're either trying to fix a problem that you have for your own personal stuff or you're trying to learn something new. I think it's a net win with this stuff. Yeah. Totally.

I don't even know what else Node say about it, but that's it. Let us know what you have vibe coded. Love to hear it. It's, it's great to great to see everybody's replies.

for when you're trying to learn something and you're trying to just or or build some software, much longer, some of the stuff is surprisingly good, and it's kind of fun, I realized it's much more complicated because I need a images that popped up. Right? And then when the chat stuff popped up, everybody was posting the hilarious

need to be printed for each piece. And, like, that took me, like, fifteen minutes, and I was just like, okay. I I never would have not never, but that would have taken me That's story. But I think I think it's a net win

this. So I started, And normally, this stuff is you just print off a sheet of it. You print off as many as you want, and they all click together, and you're you're up and running. However, because I wanna put a nice border around it, very attainable. We saw it with with drag and drop website builders. Right?

Node different possible pieces. And I was like, man, I'm having a hard time

if I were to build this myself. I probably would not have built it myself. I probably would have made a spreadsheet or or a piece of paper or something like that. Yeah. And to be clear to to people listening, it's not because you cannot do that. You are very capable of making,

that I'm three d printing, and I'm I'm gonna be hanging

and I don't have a nearly as nice of a visualization microcontrollers,

and I need

grid,

But Yeah. I'll we'll we'll throw an image up on the screen right now JS I'm building a pnpm parametric

like, writing it, scribbling it down on a piece of paper to try to visualize what I needed. It's a four by six grid, and I was like, you know Node?

If you don't know what you're doing and you don't know what the code is is doing and you're not learning anything from it and you're just pushing out more slop into the world,

all of those things, I can get behind that, and I can see a benefit to that. So Oh, yeah. Yeah. Different. Yeah. I think I think of, like, somebody like a kid right now trying to build a game,

Yeah. It is a it is a whole thing because, like, I think there is some degree where vibe coding is

I don't like that. I think that's bad.

stupid.

But if if you are using it as a learning opportunity, you're using it to excite yourself, you're learning it to make things be productive, it takes so long to see any major real change in it, especially because I'm not great at it, that, like, piano but they cannot be that productive

Levels. Io is is building this, like, whole airplane thing.

but it certainly makes And certainly, that will make people who are good at this stuff mad,

but that always happens in every single industry. When something comes along and makes it easier, it doesn't do away with the need for those people,

sloppy version of something very, and and I feel so much more confident whatever they possibly would want.

things like that. We hated that because it the code that it outputted was garbage, you Node? But the reality is that And then I just I just kept saying, good. Now visualize it. Good. Now make me a cut sheet of how many

And the idea with vibe coding mostly

is that you JS the developer are not getting really deep into the code. You're not really paying attention to the close details.

might not vibe off? I wanna vibe off. Yes.

You're mostly just running it, seeing if it works, seeing how it works, prompting again, tweaking, prompting again, prompting again, just on repeat until the thing does what you want it to do.

wanna get into it and I try to correct a problem, visualizing

again, it ends up being being a lot of slop. And, there's I think there are certain instances and projects and things like that that make more sense for exploring that type of way. And and, sadly, I think the inexperienced developers amongst us

understand when and where that that line is. Totally. I I find myself Wes I

It's a form of AI Scott, and right now, you can actually make stuff with it. You Node, believe it or not, people

What I found

for a lot of people.

And I think personal software might be more connected for, I would say, more responsible

vibe coding, what if you've never heard of this term, you're not on social media, you haven't seen people talk about it, what the heck is it? It's basically coding entirely using prompts,

without it because they don't have the knowledge base. That's an assumption, but that's my experience, what I'm seeing on on socials. So junior level programmer that you're watching very carefully, and you're approving all of the code line by line, and you're reading it and you're really comprehending exactly what's going on for every single thing that's added to your code Bos, one, it's gonna be a lot better at the end of the day. But two,

inexperienced code bases.

things like cursor or cloud code, these types of systems that are agentic, that do a lot for you, that are adding multiple files, connecting things, running projects.

is that, specifically, it's a lot of, And just the answer JS no to all of those things. Right? And without those answers and while the you today probably can't

where you might not have been able to possibly people are making games.

it works. And I'm kinda somewhere in between because top right, bottom left. Like, it's basically the sliding panels of CSS in real life. I need the I need the corner pieces. I need the tops, the bottoms, the lefts, the rights, and the internal pieces.

prompts in, and I just have to scrap it and sort of start it start again from that prompt because

I I find sometimes I'm two or three I'm thinking right now, my kids wanna have wanted to make a math game for a while. You Node, they wanna make, like, a flashcard, but, like, imagine

it just starts making it Wes and worse, and it starts adding a whole bunch of stuff. But the the whole idea with with five coding is that you don't necessarily care. And as long as it works, world where you run around and answer questions. I'd probably make that in, like, an hour or so. And now and that would be and and Scott of going through that. And and I built the whole six hours or something like that. Wes. Totally. But I could probably because because you're just learning. And it's not to say that I didn't learn anything. I think I came out of that project hated serial connections

people go, Yeah, of course, you can you can generate a dog eating a hamburger,

we're having that these Dreamweaver drag and drop or these Squarespaces,

it's just garbage as well because, like,

Wes could build.

everybody was posting the most hilarious I thought, like, yeah, we could build that. Let's set across some time. And for me to make a little flashcard game from scratch, very quickly for this sort of vibe Node is you're the stuff that you can make with it, of course, like, anybody can do that. So I think we're sort of in that stage right now for building these types of things. But not to say that it's just, like, things that you're not necessarily comfortable with. So Mhmm. The the Roomba, I wrote a whole bunch of

you Node, like, oh, wow, you Node, like, that was that was the most hilarious mind blowing thing a couple Yarn ago. And now you see it, like,

demos. It's good for personal software, which we'll touch on that. It's good for concept? confidently ship something that is good

a lot of people don't necessarily care, as long as it works and does what the thing that they're trying to do. Yeah. I remember the first Adobe web builder that I had that had a drag and drop UI, and it's like, oh, I can get something looking really Node, and then it wouldn't work in various instances or it's full of bugs or all kinds of weird stuff. I think right Node, in 2025, you can be surprisingly effective vibe coding. But, Sign up and get two months for free with the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word.

I think VibeCoding is good for without those those tools and knowledge and and, you know, there there's still that gap there. So, yeah, vibe Node your production people UI, which is the keys or all you know, they're the way the piano keys are shifted? with vibe coding

I think another area

Not that you can't use these tools, but you need to treat them more like a an assistant that you're you're really watching closely, Proof of concept.

for now at least. Right? Yeah. Vibe coding your production code is only gonna be I'm gonna say it's not good at all because, again, vibe coding kind of implies that it's you're not even looking at the code really or you're not getting deep into the code. But, yeah, for throwaway personal software, projects, demos, inspiration,

rather than vibe coding it. I think about this all the time. I have friends that are like, oh, I made this, might if you're not getting into the stuff, you know, March 2025 as it is right now,

app that does this whole thing, and I just did it with prompts. It was super easy. Like, I'm gonna turn turn this into a product. And I'm thinking like, alright. Well, do you know anything about authentication? Do you know anything about databases, security? Do you know anything about anything?

I think it's it's totally valid and and works just fine for that stuff. Totally. I I think I'm going back and thinking about the stuff that I've built in the last little while. And and and quite honestly, I don't even remember half the stuff that I've I've I've Node because I just I build it, it does its thing, and and I throw it out.

we had my whole MIDI controller thing, and, like, Wes. Could I have absolutely coded

Or I can ask cursor to create a piano for me aesthetically in CSS, in HTML, but I can guide it. I can say use grid or flex Bos for this. I can use this or that. Give it this aesthetic, whatever. You can guide it with the technology.

That's really where where you see the benefit. Like, for instance, You can tell it the approach to use. You can give it hints and stuff like that. But I didn't vibe code that entire app, but I vibe coded the keyboard interface because I just flat out didn't wanna take the time to do it. And it's again, it's just a a four fun project. Right? So I do I do really find that that to be like a nice little sweet spot. It's something that you could do. You know how to do it. You know what it looks like when it's done right, and you can just ask it. Save me some time here. Do me a solid. Mhmm.

a MIDI Yeah. So it's funny that you say that personal and I do think personal software is connected

this interface A grid. Yes. A grid or any of this stuff. It the the benefit really comes from the speed and effort that it takes.

UI to control the the vacuum, the Roomba thing. I have a video on, you can go watch it. I built that whole whole thing. And that Wes, I guess you call that vibe coding because I

c plus plus, I think. I forgot what language it was. Yeah. You know? And Yeah. I think it was c plus Wes. And I was debugging,

if you look at it, it's it's not ideal. There's a lot of like weird React hooks and and stuff, but but it worked. It worked really nice and it was able to get it up up and running really, really quickly. So both Anything else you wanna say about vibe Node, or do you just wanna this grid in our gym. And then you can put all these hooks into this grid and hang up all the different attachments for the gym.

languages where you're not really comfortable with or or areas of stuff you've never worked in before,

in c plus plus now. Not that the robot can write it for me, but, like, I I feel like I understand a lot more about it. And I don't know that I would have gotten that understanding reading a book. But controlling a vacuum, intro level

you're going into Alright.

way smarter than than I went in. Right? Like, I know so much more about three years ago, so exciting for them. And I think, like, that would be a net win because they're excited about computers, they're excited about coding, and they're gonna be learning math. I know. I was thinking about this a lot with, like you know, my son and I are getting into game development, and as I know we had a lot of angry people, Scott of angry replies about when we do AI stuff on this podcast.

I would have certainly got there.

and then UIs and things that you need to just crank out as as quickly as possible,

of vibe coding, let me give it to you straight about, like, what we're trying to do. We're gonna we're gonna be talking about, like, just building random stuff I'm just gonna start prompting my way into this. So I built a little thing that I said I have a four by six grid,

vibe coded. I don't Node. People the other words that people have been using this JS, like, well, like, personal software kind of fits into this, you know, or or throwaway software I've been calling it JS, I've built quite a few things recently where I just need it very quickly. Once it served its purpose, it it gets thrown away.

with AI that might be kinda good, but you don't necessarily care. We're gonna talk about what it is and whether or not we should be doing this and and some examples of of stuff we have like, that's I don't know. I could probably do that in

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about vibe coding. Now before you before you shut it off because you're the

sick of the obnoxiousness chat back and forth, and then that sort of died out. And and now that you can just, like, literally make a game

Fix it for me, and then it just fixes itself. So check it out, century.i0/syntax.

as an assistant, as like a

This podcast is presented by Century in case you could not tell that. But either way, I do think that it is a major concern doing it because they are becoming productive with it,

for vibe coding specifically. If you are an advanced developer and you're using these agentic coding solutions so check it out at century.io.

you might actually get very frustrated and wanna do some of it yourself because the the AI stuff can do a whole bunch of changes at once, and you're like, that's not what I would have Deno, and that's a bad idea. Whatever you're doing, it's a bad idea. Let me do it myself. Move. It's mine. You know? But other people, I I think they just they're just checking to see if that that shit works, and that's it. You know? So I mean It's it's really funny because, like, when the the AI images stuff first hit, I don't know, probably developers than it is for other people, if if that's the best way to say that. Because Yeah.

It's and you might not know it's terrible, which is man, that's, like, that's at Century's ideal landing spot JS, like, you have some bugs in your Node, and you don't know about them. And, like, if you're vibe coding guys flop running. Yeah. Yeah. You don't even know it's not like you don't even know about your bugs. You don't even know about your code, let alone the bugs, which is gonna be full of them. So,

And it's also good for century at century.i0

because your code is gonna suck sometimes. It's gonna be terrible.

Solve all your problems that way, and there is actually an AI tool within century too. So maybe at some point, century part becomes part of the AI vibe coding flow, and you just click fix it for me. Oh, there's a bug. Fix it for me. Fix it for me.

he he's losing attention. And I'm doing my best to be like, oh, we got a guy. He's walking around now. He's not pointing in the right direction. He's not doing the right animations, but he he moves. And my son's just like, okay. Great. When are we gonna get to, like, build Mario? Yeah. Because he'll he'll play Mario Maker where you're just dragging and dropping everything onto the screen, and it's so nice and fast. You get instant results or whatever. And that's what he really wants, you know, out of the experience. And, yeah, I I do think that instant feedback or or visual it's great for being inspired. There's all kinds of things. I think a lot of it

make something with the three d to define what each of the edges are called. Right? Top left, top right, edge right, edge left, etcetera, internal.