Ask HN: Why are modern AIs ignorant or reluctant to talk about "vibe coding"?

Is it because very little of their training data has the term "vibe coding" in it?

2 points | by amichail 1 day ago

3 comments

  • delaminator 1 day ago
    You're not giving us any evidence of this. You're just asserting it.

    Claude will happily talk about vibe coding as much as you want.

    One of its active working prompts is "vibing".

    It wasn't a popular term until early 2025.

    https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

    > There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. ...

    11:17 pm · 2 Feb 2025 5.2M Views

    • uberman 1 day ago
      I asked Claude to give me the pros and cons of "vibe coding" and it did so without confusion.
      • amichail 1 day ago
        • delaminator 1 day ago
          So it's neither ignorant nor reluctant to tell you about vibe coding.
          • amichail 1 day ago
            It didn't know what it was at the beginning of the conversation.
            • delaminator 6 hours ago
              To an LLM all coding it does is vibe coding.

              In this case you’re asking it a closed question with a {yes, no, maybe} answer set.

              It tries its hardest to give you more than that.

              You’re asking a machine to have an opinion. If someone asked you that question, what would your answer be?

              Think about your goals and state them more clearly.

              “What are the pros and cons of …”

            • uberman 20 hours ago
              When you say:

              "Should schools have a chess variant class where students invent and vibe code novel chess variants and play each other's variants?"

              I don't know what you are saying. Sounds more like your objective is to have students brainstorm new ways to play chess. Why is there any indication that the LLM should assume this is a programming question?

              In fact, it has divined that programming might be involved and offered that certain python libraries might be leveraged. You frame your input as a question about schools offering a certain class and the LLM responded by assuming that is what your objective was and started to help build such a curriculum.

              Did you expect with your input that the LLM would simply jump into writing some kind of code? Should it have written a multi user chess playground? Should it have written a python chess variant? I personally think it did the reasonable thing and from the context you provided assumed your task was to build such a class pedagogically not produce some python code.

              If you are focused on chatGPT lumping other forms of "hacking" or "cowboy coding" into the same bucket as "LLM Assist" and calling it all "Vibe Coding" I personally don't have an issue with that. They all fall into the bucket of fast and loose coding techniques. That is just my take on it though.

  • PurpleRamen 1 day ago
    Vibe Coding is a fresh term, not very well-defined yet. Depending on your phrasing and the model's age, it would be easy for any LLM to trip over it.
  • eimrine 1 day ago
    What did they say?
    • amichail 1 day ago
      If you submit a prompt with "vibe coding" in it, they will reply in a way that seems to imply they have no idea what the term means and are just faking a reply based on surrounding context in the prompt.