Vibe Coding Doesn't Require LLMs

I recently read I Know When You’re Vibe Coding by Alex Kondov in which he described certain characteristic “smells” of vibe-coded software. For example, he points to LLMs proclivity to pave their own path and go against established patterns within a project.

The article resonated with me, but I realized that it resonated with me at a deeper level than just explaining my interactions with LLM-written software. I realized that I’ve seen these “smells” before in pre-LLM software (especially that written by students).

So what is the common thread between these student-produced and LLM-produced code-smells? Kondov alludes to the reason in the conclusion of his post where he argues that we need to care about the quality, consistency, and maintainability of the software that we write.

I suggest that vibe-coding smells emerge wherever the entity writing the code doesn’t care about the software it writes. LLMs by definition cannot “care”. Students have an amazing capacity to not care about the thing they are ostensibly meant to learn. Even some professionals don’t seem to care about the software they write.

Thus, I suggest that in reality, vibe coding has existed for as long as the software industry has been populated with people who don’t care about the software they write. It just so happened that in a pre-LLM world, those who didn’t care were rarely able to produce anything that even compiled, much less that worked. LLMs have merely made it easier for those who do not care to produce seemingly working software.

I am still forming my thoughts on how I believe that LLMs will change the software industry. It’s clear that LLMs make the act of writing code quicker, but I believe that writing code was never the bottleneck. I also see LLMs lower the activation energy required to prototype solutions, but productionising code is always the hardest part. LLMs may make us faster at delivering software, but solving the customer’s problem is always the real goal. However, there is one thing I am certain of: code produced by people who care about the software they write will always be better than software written by people who don’t care, regardless of how the code is produced.