If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive.

In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, they will dodge you, and if you ask front-end or web developers, they are waiting for you to provide them the API. The hardest part is understanding the requirements. It's not because of illiteracy. It's because software development is a lot more than coding and requires critical thinking to discover the requirements.

I have successfully vibe-coded features in C. I still don't like C. The agent forgets to free memory latter just like a human would and has to go back and fix it later.

On the other hand, I've enjoyed vibe coding Rust more, because I'm interested in Rust and felt like my understanding approved along they way as I saw what code was produced.

A lot of coding "talent" isn't skill with the language, it's learning all the particularities of the dependencies: The details of the Smithay package in Rust, the complex set of GTK modules or the Wayland protocol implementation.

On a good day, AI can help navigate all that "book knowledge" faster.

There was a recent discussion, “Why AI Needs Hard Rules, Not Vibe Checks” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152838). We need as many checks as possible - and ideally ones that come for free (e.g., guaranteed by types, lifetimes, etc.) - which is why Rust might be the language for vibe coding.

Without checks and feedback, LLMs can easily generate unsafe code. So even if they can generate C or Assembly that works, they’re likely to produce code that’s riddled with incorrect edge cases, memory leaks, and so on.

Also, abstraction isn’t only for humans; it’s also for LLMs. Sure, they might benefit from different kinds of abstraction - but that doesn’t mean “oh, just write machine code” is the way to go.

I really tried to get into the vibe coding thing - just describe the thing I need in human language and let the agent figure it out. It was incredible at first. Then I realized that I am spending a lot of time writing clarifications because the agent either forgot or misinterpreted something. Then I realized that I am waiting an awful long time for each agent step to complete just to write another correction or clarification. Then I realized that this constant start-stop process is literally melting my brain and making me unable to do any real work myself. It's basically having the same effect as scrolling any other algorithmic feed. Now I am back to programming myself and only bouncing the boring bits off of ChatGPT.

I very much doubt the ability of LLMs to provide leak-free, faulty memory management free, C code, because they are trained on loads of bad code in that regard. They will not output code of the quality that maybe 1% of C developers could, if even that many. Fact is, that even well paid and professional C/C++ developers introduce memory management issues in such code bases (see Chromium project statistics about this). So chances to get good C programs from LLMs, which learn from far lower quality code than Chromium, are probably very slim.

Vibe-coding a program that segfaults and you don't know why and you keep burning compute on that? Doesn't seem like a great idea.

> But if you look carefully, you will notice that it doesn’t struggle with undefined behavior in C. Or with making sure that all memory is properly freed. Or with off-by-one errors.

Doubt. These things have been trained to emulate humans, why wouldn't they make the same mistakes that humans do? (Yes, they don't make spelling errors, but most published essays etc. don't have spelling errors, whereas most published C codebases do have undefined behaviour).

From what I have seen successful ~vibe-coders in my cirle are really bullish on type-safety and testing. Up to a point I have seen a guy porting his favourite property-based testing framework to TypeScript :D

So, vibecoding in C feels like playing with loaded gun.

> if vibe coding is the future of software development (and it is), then why bother with languages that were designed for people who are not vibe coding? Shouldn’t there be such a thing as a “vibe-oriented programming language?” VOP.

A language designed for vibe coding could certainly be useful, but what that means is the opposite of what the author thinks that means.

The author thinks that such a language wouldn't need to have lots of high-level features and structure, since those are things that exist for human comprehension.

But actually, the opposite is true. If you're designing a language for LLMs, the language should be extremely strict and wordy and inconvenient and verbose. You should have to organize your code in a certain way, and be forced to check every condition, catch every error, consider every edge case, or the code won't compile.

Such a language would aggravate a human, but a machine wouldn't care. And LLMs would benefit from the rigidness, as it would help prevent any confusion or hallucination from causing bugs in the finished software.

The answer is type-safety. LLMs produce errors, as do humans. A language with carefully designed semantics and a well-implemented safety checker (or maybe even a proof assistant) will help express much more correct code.

I've had the most success running Claude iteratively with mypy and pytest. But it regularly wants to just delete the tests or get rid of static typing. A language like Haskell augmented with contracts over tests wouldn't allow that. (Except for diverging into a trivial ad-hoc dynamic solution, of course.)

There is a hidden hypothesis in this article that AI "does not struggle" with things like undefined behaviour, off by one errors and undefined behaviour.

Yes, it can consistently generate code that works and seems to be on top of it all due to a lot of training data. But wouldn't that use up more tokens and computational resources to produce than e.g. the same program in python?

If using more complex languages requires more resources from LLM, the same principles apply. One-off scripts are better in high level languages. Hot paths executed millions of times a second are better in lower level languages with high optimisation potential.

LLMs might slightly shift the correct choice towards lower languages. E.g. a small one-off script in C is much more viable with LLM's help. But the moment one needs to reuse it, it grows, and needs to be modified, one might regret not using higher level language.

> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

Because I want to be able to review it, and extend it myself.

edit: Pure vibe coding is a joke or thought exercise, not a goal to aspire to. Do you want to depend on a product that has not been vetted by any human? And if it is your product, do you want the risk of selling it?

I can imagine a future where AI coders and AI QA bots do all the work but we are not there yet. Besides, an expressive language with safety features is good for bots too.

Why not:

- The C-compiler. AI tools work better if their automated feedback loop via tools includes feedback on correctness, safety, etc. The C compiler is not great at that. It requires a lot of discipline from the programmer. There mostly isn't a compile time safety net.

- Macros add to this mess. C's macros are glorified string replacements.

- Automated tests are another tool that helps improving quality of vibe coded code. While you can of course write tests for C code, the test frameworks are a bit immature and it's hard to write testable code in C due to the lack of abstractions.

- Small mistakes can have catastrophic consequences (crashes, memory overflows)

- A lot of libraries (including the standard library) contain tools with very sharp edges.

- Manual memory management adds a lot of complexity to code bases and the need for more discipline.

- Weak/ambiguous semantics mean that it's harder to reason about code.

There are counter arguments to each of those things. Compilers have flags. There are static code analyzers. And with some discipline, it gets better. You could express that discipline in additional instructions for your agent. And of course people do test C code. There just are a lot of projects where none of that stuff is actively used. Vibe coding on those projects would probably be a lot harder than on a project that uses more structured languages and tools.

All these things make it harder to work with C code for humans; and for AIs. But not impossible of course. AI coding models are getting quite good at coding. Including coding in C.

But it makes it a poor default language for AI coding. The ideal vibe coding language for an AI would be simple, expressive, have great tools and compilers, fast feedback loops, etc. It means the AI has less work to do: shorter/faster feedback loops, less iterations and reasoning to do, less complex problems to solve, less ambiguity, entire categories of bugs that are avoided, etc. Same reasons as to why it is a poor choice for most human programmers to default to.

This post mixes up “easy for compilers and assemblers to transform and easy for cpus to execute” with “easy for LLMs to understand” and assumes that anything in the first category must also be in the second category since they’re both computers. In reality, the tools that help humans think are also useful for LLMs.

>Vibe coding makes me feel dirty in ways that I struggle to articulate precisely. It’s not just that it feels like 'cheating'(though it does). I also think it takes a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

This exactly. Programming is art, because it comes from the soul. You can tackle a problem a million ways, but there's only one way that YOU would solve it.

Vibe coding feels like people who aren't creative, stealing everyone's creativity, and then morphing it into something they find appealing.

There is no skill.

There is no talent.

You are asking the machine to do ALL THE THINKING. All the little decisions, the quirks, the bugs, the comments to yourself. All the things that make a piece of code unique.

Because I don't know C well enough.

My philosophy regarding AI is that you should never have it do something you couldn't do yourself.

Of course people break this rule, or the concept of vibe coding wouldn't exist. But some of us actually get a lot of value from AI without succumbing to it. It just doesn't make sense to me to trust a machine's hallucinations for something like programming code. It fabricates things with such confidence that I can't even imagine how it would go if I didn't already know the topic I had it work on.

Can it generate good code?

Both the author and I agree in that yes, it can.

Does it always generate good code?

Here is where the author and I disagree vehemently. The author implies that the ai-generated code is always correct. My personal experience is that it often isn't. Not even for big projects - for small bugfixes it also misunderstands and hallucinates solutions.

So no C or assembly for me, thank you very much.

I think you should use a language with a highly expressive type system. That can be assembly too. See TAL back from the 1990'es. I also think you should use a language with a very expressive module system.

The reason is that you want to have some kind of guidance from a larger perspective in the long run. And that is exactly what types and module systems provide. The LLM has to create code which actually type checks, and it can use type checking as an important part of verification.

If you push this idea further: use Lean, Agda or Rocq. Let the LLM solve the nitty gritty details of proof, but use the higher-level theorem formation as the vessel for doing great things.

If you ask for a Red-black tree, you get a red-black tree. If you ask for a red-black tree where all the important properties are proven, you don't have to trust the LLM anymore. The proof is the witness of correctness. That idea is extremely powerful, because it means you can suddenly lift software quality by an order of magnitude, without having to trust the LLM at all.

We currently don't do this. I think it's because proving software correctness is just 50x more work, and it moves too slow. But if you could get an amplifier (LLM) to help out, it's possible this becomes more in the feasible area for a lot of software.

This is one area I do use LLMs for, write small utils and test code, and very often in languages I very seldom even touch, such as C# and Rust. This to me seems to be the core idea of a tool that is awesome at translating!

> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

It is not portable to computers other than x86. It is one of the reasons I do not use x86 assembly much even though I have a x86 computer; I prefer C. It is not about vibe coding.

> I suppose what I’m getting at, here, is that if vibe coding is the future of software development (and it is), then why bother with languages that were designed for people who are not vibe coding? Shouldn’t there be such a thing as a “vibe-oriented programming language?” VOP. You read it here first.

Someone told me that two companies (one of which is Google) were working on such a thing, although I do not know the details (or if they were correct about that), and I do not know whether or not it resembles what is described in that article.

I do not use LLM myself, although I have seen a few examples of it. I have not seen very many so the sample size is too small, but what I have seen (from simple example programs), the program works although it is not written very well.

This is treating the LLM like it is the computer or has some kind of way of thinking. But LLM is a "language" model, I'm pretty sure the easier for human to read, the easier for LLM to learn and generate. Abstractions also benefit the model, it does not need to generate a working 2s complement, just a working call to addition of abstracted types.

And just in my experience, I feel everyone is slowly learning, all models are better at the common thing, they are better at bash, they are better at Python and JS, and so on. Everyone trying to invent at that layer has failed to beat that truth. That bootstrapping challenge is dismissed much too easily in the article in my opinion.

I see a lot of "vibe-coding" related articles, but I don't see a lot of shipped projects/products via "vibe-coding". I would like to find some examples instead of this kind of articles ?

Eh. Vibe Coding is best when your “writing code to eyeballing results” is the smallest. It works well when you can “test” that your code works with purely looking at the result and clicking around.

For this it’s the web deployment target and fast compile times rather than the language itself that is useful.

Routinely I am sent code that works, but obviously nobody has looked at. Because they don’t even actually know what the code does.

For prototyping this is quite great. I think it’s the biggest competitor to tools like figma, because writing actually functional program with access to real APIs beats mocks. Now, how often will these end up in production and blow everything up…

I think the main reason not to go full-throttle into "vibes -> machine code" (to extrapolate past doing it in C) is because we have a history of building nested dolls of bounded error in our systems. We do that with the idea of file systems, process separation, call stacks, memory allocations, and virtual machines.

Now, it is true that vibes results in producing a larger quantity of lower-level code than we would stomach on our own. But that has some consequences for the resulting maintenance challenge, since the system-as-a-whole is less structured by its boundaries.

I think a reasonable approach when using the tools is to address problems "one level down" from where you'd ordinarily do it, and to allow yourself to use something older where there is historical source for the machine to sample from. So, if you currently use Python, maybe try generating some Object Pascal. If you use C++, maybe use plain C. If there were large Forth codebases I'd recommend targeting that since it breaks past the C boundary into "you're the operator of the system, not just a developer", but that might be the language that the approach stumbles over the most.

I also enjoy coding! It’s fun. It’s also only about 10% of my job as a software developer, and I can and do use an LLM for it whenever I can find an opportunity. The author is a professor. Not to disparage that perspective, but she paints a picture of the joys of programming that are overshadowed in environments where you are actually building real world robust systems with clueless users, vague requirements, shifting budgets and priorities, etc.

As to why not use C, or assembly, it’s not just about the code, but the toolchains. These require way more knowledge and experience to get something working than, say, Python - although that has its own rather horrible complexities with packaging and portability on the back end of the code authoring process.

I think you're going to need a superhuman intelligence's idea of a super-superhuman intelligence at the very least if you're going to expect C programs that are memory safe.

I'll admit that I'd like to do a programming challenge with or without AI that would be like "advent of code" in assembly but if it was actual "advent of code" the direct route is to write something that looks like a language runtime system so you have the dynamic data structures you need on your fingertips.

In loads of projects you can't just pick a language and it's fine.

If I'm making a C#/WPF app, I can't just decide to make part of it C.

I get it's just a generalised criticism of vibe coding, but "why not use a harder language then" doesn't seem to make any sense.

Maybe I'm still in denial about the benefit of AI code design, but when I have an initial set of requirements for a program, the design begins. That is just a set of unanswered questions that I address with slowly growing code and documents. Then the final documents and code match the answers to all the questions that rose from the answers of previous questions. More importantly, I know how the code answers them and someone else can learn from the documentation. Since the invention of "velocity" I feel like much of the industry treats code and programmers like tissues. Wipe your nose and throw it away. Now we have AI-based automatic tissue dispensers and Weizenbaum's gripe about programmers creating work for themselves other than solving the requirements of the actual problems continues.

I agree that coding is more fun than vibe coding, right up until you have a massive refactor that is super repetitive and no fun to author, but an LLM can do it in no time flat. Even if an IDE can help with the refactor, there are cases where they can't. And anyways, if you're working with a codebase you understand but are not super familiar with, then vibe coding is incredibly productive, though, well, you'll spend much more time reviewing what the LLM did, so maybe not quite that productive (unless you count on others to do your review, but that's not very nice, and it will show).

It sounds like his main gripe of vibe coding is it robs you of the satisfaction as a programmer in solving the problem. I don't disagree, but the preferences of programmers are not necessarily the main driving force here behind these changes. In many cases it's their boss and their boss doesn't really care.

It's one thing to program as a hobby or to do programming in an institutional environment free of economic pressures like academia (like this educator), it's another thing to exist as a programmer outside that.

My partner was telling me her company is now making all their software engineers use ChatGPT Codex. This isn't a company with a great software engineer culture, but it's probably representative of the median enterprise/non SV/non tech start employer than people realise.

If you're going to vibe code, with an intent to review the output so that the ultimate product is actually useful and does what was intended, you should do it in whatever language(s) you're knowledgeable in so you can actually competently review that output.

If you don't give a damn about integrity though, then may as well get funky with it. Hell, go hard: Do it in brainfuck and just let it rip.

> why not do it in C?

Well, because you can do it in Fortran, of course!

What else do you want? Multidimensional arrays out of the box, fast loops, native cuda support, trivial build and packaging system, zero version churning... all of this just with the bare language. It's the anti-python! The perfect language, you could say! Strings and i/o are a bit cumbersome, agreed, but your llm can take care of these without any trouble, no matter the language.

I would say, because time to review is the most important metric in vibe coding.

I prompt my agents to use proper OO-encapsulated idiomatic ruby paradigms. Your goal should be reduced cognitive load.

Even if you never write a line of code, you will still need to understand your problems to solve them.

"Vibe debugging" will get you stuck in loops of hallucinated solutions.

Alright, the whole article stands on the lifting done by the concept of "vibe coding", which is not just asking an LLM to write some code, scan it quickly to check if it at least makes somewhat sense and then accept it. It is based on pure vibe coding, where the user literally has no idea what's being produced.

After having understood the context, I still believe that a strongly typed language would be a much better choice of a language, for exactly the same reason why I wouldn't recommend starting a project in C unless there is a strong preference (and even then Rust would probably be better still).

LLMs are not perfect, just like humans, so I would never vibe code in any other environment than one in which many/most logical errors are by definition impossible to compile.

Not sure if C is worse than python/js in that respect (I'd argue it is better for some and worse for other, regarding safety) but Java, Swift, C#, Go, Rust, etc. are great languages for vibe coding since you have the compiler giving you almost instant feedback on how well your vibe coding is going.

To answer the question literally, vs discuss "is vibe-coding good": The more tricky details in a language, the more I've seen LLM-first coding struggle. Rust, for instance, often leads to the model playing whack-a-mole with lifetime or borrow checker issues. It can often get to something that compiles and passes the tests, but the process gives me some pause in terms of "what am I not checking for that the whack-a-mole may have missed."

In C, without anything like a borrow checker or such, I'd be very worried about there being subtle pointer safety issues...

Now, some of that could be volumes of training data, etc, but Rust is widely discussed these days in the places these models are trained on, so I'm not certain it's a training problem vs a attention-to-detail across files problem. I.e., since LLMs are trained to mimic human language, programming languages that are most procedural-human-language-like (vs having other levels o fmeaning embedded in the syntax too) may exactly be those "LLM-friendly" languages.

What people miss is that vibe coding actually is coding, except the code are your prompts and the LLM is the compiler.

The problem here is that human languages are terrible programming languages and LLMs are terrible compilers.

> I also think it takes a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

I used to say that implementation does not matter, tests should be your main focus. Now I treat every bit of code I wrote with my bare hands like a candy, agents have sucked the joy out of building things

My gut reaction is, if AI was really good at vibe coding all the infra it could be nice, but getting C deployed and productized is the potential challenge. The "roads" we built for hyper scaling apps doesn't strike me as C friendly. And, even with the friendlier deployment strateies on next, python, etc, AI still slips up a lot.

I did a goodly chunk of vibe coding over the summer and I found that the best language for me was Rust implementations with Python bindings for interface. A few reasons:

- Everything about rust enforcing correctness catches lots of bugs

- Using a high-level API means I can easily hand-check things in a repl

- In addition to tests, I required a full “demo notebook” with any PR — I should be able to read through it and confirm that all the functionality I wanted has actually been implemented

If the philosophy is (and it should be) “loc is free”, it’s worth thinking about how we can make LLMs produce more loc to give us additional comfort with correctness. Language choice is very much a way.

The vast majority of software models are trained on have little to no standards and contains all kinds of errors and omissions.

And these are systems that require a human in the loop to verify the output because you are ultimately responsible for it when it makes a mistake. And it will.

It’s not fun because it’s not fun being an appendage to a machine that doesn’t know or care that you exist. It will generate 1200 lines of code. You have to try and make sure it doesn’t contain the subtle kinds of errors that could cost you your job.

At least if you made those errors you could own them and learn from it. Instead you gain nothing when the machine makes an error except the ability to detect them over time.

I think if you don’t know C extremely well then there’s no point vibe coding it. If you don’t know anything about operating systems you’re not going to find the security bugs or know if the scheduler you chose does the the right thing. You won’t be able to tell the difference between good code and bad.

If you're going to vibe code on legacy code, use the languages used there. If you're going to vibe code something new, then I recommend Rust. There are few cases where I would vibe code something brand new in C, mainly when building a library I'm going to need to use from other C programs.

> all the way to the borderlands of active anxiety—not quite understanding what Claude just wrote.

This is a big issue, personally. I write Python and bash these days and I love that we're not bottlenecked by IDE-based autocomplete anymore, especially for dynamic languages and a huge amount of fixing and incremental feature work can be done in minutes instead of days thanks to AI being able to spot patterns. Simultaneously I'm frustrated when these agents fail to deliver small changes and I have to jump in and change something I don't have a good mental model of or, worse still, something that's all Greek to me, like Javascript.

"If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in assembly?"

Many people I've seen have taken existing software and 'ported' it to more performant languages like C, Rust, etc.

LLMs are extremely efficient and good at translation.

The biggest question is maintainability and legibility. If you want it for your own proprietary software, this can (and probably is, generally) a good pattern if you can get the LLM to nail language specific challenges (e.g. memory allocation in C)

However, fewer people can write C code generally, and even fewer can use it to build things like UI's. So you're by definition moving the software away from a collaborative mechanism.

The abstraction layers were built for human maintenance. LLMs don't need that.

I don’t buy that LLMs won’t make off-by-one or memory safety errors, or that they won’t introduce undefined behavior. Not only can they not reason about such issues, but imagine how much buggy code they’re trained on!

Never used C much, but I would assume it is more LOC than a newer language with more features. Less code is a fairly important feature for LLMs with relatively limited context windows.

If vibe coding is the future as the author suggests we are in for a lot more and a lot longer outages

Even experts create C/C++ code that is routinely exploited in the wild (see: pegasus malware, Zerodium, Windows zero days, Chrome zero days, etc.). No, please don't vibe code anything security critical, and please don't create unnecessary security risk by writing it in unsafe languages such as C/C++. The only advantage I can see is it creates some fun easy targets for beginning exploit developers. But that's not an advantage for you.

I do vibe code in C. From what I understand, Ruby is written entirely in C. It's a wonderful high-level language experience on top of such a storied runtime as C (truly!).

> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

I do vibe code in C; I'm not a C programmer and I certainly couldn't do a security audit of any serious C codebase, but I can read and understand a simple C program, and debug and refactor it (as long as it's still quite simple).

And it's super fun! Being able to compile a little C utility that lives in the Windows tray and has a menu, etc. is exhilarating.

But I couldn't do that in assembly; I would just stare at instructions and not understand anything. So, yes for C, no for assembly.

If the headline is a question, the answer is "No".

It's so refreshing to see a proper website these days, no js, no cookie banners, just hypertext. Your part about still enjoying programming really resonated with me. I still get so much joy out of programming after 20 years of doing it, it's still just as exciting to learn new things, and I am definitely not running out of new things to learn.

I would absolutely love to teach programming to non-programmers. I have also been offered a job at the technical school where I graduated. But remembering how uninterested the vast majority of my classmates were back then discouraged me from even trying. I guess what I'd want is a teach a room full of people excited to learn about programming.

> Wouldn’t a language designed for vibe coding naturally dispense with much of what is convenient and ergonomic for humans in favor of what is convenient and ergonomic for machines? Why not have it just write C? Or hell, why not x86 assembly?

Or why not just produce a binary directly? It seems we've just invented a compiler.

I like the idea of reimagining the whole stack so as to make AI more productive, but why stop at languages (as x86 asm is still a language)? Why not the operating system? Why not the hardware layer? Why not LLM optimized verilog, or an AI tuned HDL?

I think this is an odd idea. For a lot of reasons, but one is simply that higher level languages _tend_ to be terser, and context window matters for LLMs. Expressing more in less is valuable.

No need for using assembler, LLMs should be writing machine bits directly into executables. It is also fairly simple to teach them how to do it. Provided we have some executable that was written in some human-readable computer language. We can read through the bits of the executable, and describe each portion using English, based on the description of what the original human-readable language is doing. This new model will only learn the English representation of chunks of bits and how they go together into an executable. After learning several billion such narrated executables it will be excellent at writing machine code.

I've vibe coded a few things in C now as experiments, but I haven't been brave enough to put any of them into production code yet. I don't trust myself to review them properly.

C extensions for SQLite: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/23/building-c-extensions-...

This one is closest to something I might use because it's C compiled to WebAssembly, so the blast radius for any dumb bugs is strictly limited: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/cmarkgfm-in-pyo...

The main benefit of C is that it is especially readable by humans.

I think that’s what makes it so common in codebases that have long term maintenance stories.

(I say that because my personal project has me reading great loads of C written by diverse authors and I am surprised at how easy it is to figure out, compared to most other languages)

LLMs are good at in-distribution programming, so inventing a new language just for them probably won’t work much better than languages they were already trained on.

If you could invent a language that is somehow tailored for vibe coding _and then_ produce a sufficient high quality corpus of it to train the AI on them, that would be something.

I’ve had a similar (likely non original) thought too that eventually LLMs could lead to something more akin to a compiler that would take human language instructions and go straight to a executable binary, possibly even with more traditional compiler analysis for performance and safety etc.

But then again LLMs in their current form are trained on mountains of human language so maybe having them output human readable code makes sense at least for now

> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that.

… well, you are wrong.

I recently gave the "vibe" AI the assignment of "using GTK [4, I think], establish a global shortcut key".

No amount of massaging the prompt, specifying the version of GTK, etc. could prevent it from just outright hallucinating the functions it wanted to call into existence. The entire reason I was asking was because I did not know what function to call, and was having difficulty discerning that from GTK's documentation. (I know how to do this now, and it is effectively undocumented.)

Prior to that, an assignment to determine some information from Alembic. Again, the AI desired to just hallucinate the functions it required into existence.

A script to fetch the merge queue length from GH. It decided to call GH's GraphQL API, which is fine, and doable for the task, but the query was entirely hallucinated.

A bash script to count files change in git. The code ran, and the output was wrong. The author did not check the LLM's code.

Even non-programming tasks are the same. Image generation is a constant fight of trying to get the AI to understand what you mean, or it just ignoring your prompts, etc. I went about 10 prompts trying to get an image with a stone statue of 4 ASCII characters in a field. The last character was consistently just wrong, and no amount of prompting to fix.

"Generate a character with a speech bubble that says 'Hi'" -> speech bubble has Japanese in it! (And the Japanese is gibberish, but if you ask AI to translate it, it "will".)

AI generated code is filled with bugs. No language is as unforgiving about bugs as C is.

Honestly, I think this is a valid viewpoint, but perhaps C is too low level. The bottleneck in generating code with LLMs tends to happen at the validation step. Using a language that has a lot of hard to validate footguns isn't great.

While I am not a big fan of Rust, the philosophy is likely useful here. Perhaps something like it, with a lot of technical validation pushed to the compiler, could actually be really useful here.

Getting rid of the garbage collector with no major increase in human cognitive load might actually be a big win.

> If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C?

Or assembly, or binary

Yes, this is a completely valid take and it is the ultimate answer to why vibe coding, the way most people define vibe coding is a dead end.

The point is we want the LLM to generate code that is first and foremost readable by humans and structured in such a way that a human can take over control at any time.

If you think this is how LLM should generate code, congratulations we are already in agreement.

If you think programmers should not exist and that you will help your bottom line by reducing the number of programmers on your payroll or worse, completely eliminate programmers from your payroll by paying product managers who will never ever look at the code (which is required for vibe coding the way I understand it), then this question at the top is for you.

Many of the “no” comments here are very focused on the current state. The author seems to be looking at a longer time horizon of computing paradigms, for example invoking ENIAC. On that scale I tend to agree. Vibe coding has only been around a year or two and look how big of an impact it already has. Imagine what another 10 years of progress will look like.

"I also think it takes a lot of the fun out of the whole thing."

Agreed. It's like replacing a complex and fulfilling journey with drugs.

Traditionally, I used Python for personal tools optimizing for quick coding and easy maintenance. These tools commonly feed UI elements like waybar, shell, and tmux, requiring frequent, fast calls.

My approach is evolving due to NixOS and home-manager with vibe coding to do the lifting. I increasing lean on vibe coding to handle simple details to safely write shell scripts (escaping strings, fml) and C/C++ apps. The complexity is minimized, allowing me to almost one-shot small utilities, and Nix handles long-term maintenance.

With NixOS, a simple C/C++ application can often replace a Python one. Nix manages reading the source, pulling dependencies, and effectively eliminating the overhead that used to favor scripting languages while marking marginal power savings during everyday use.

Re: love of programming - those who think an AI should do it all should consider whether they should outsource having sex as well.

There’s a nugget of an idea in there, even if I disagree with most of it.

But code doesn’t only need to be understood for maintenance purposes: code is documentation for business processes. It’s a thing that needs to be understandable and explainable by humans anytime the business process is important.

LLMs can never / should never replace verifiability, liability, or value judgment.

There's a straightforward answer to the "why not" question: because it will result in codebases with the same kind of memory unsafety and vulnerability as existing C code.

If an LLM is in fact capable of generating code free of memory safety errors, then it's certainly also capable of writing the Rust types that guarantee this and are checkable. We could go even further and have automated generation of proofs, either in C using tools similar to CompCert, or perhaps something like ATS2. The reason we don't do these at scale is that they're tedious and verbose, and that's presumably something AI can solve.

Similar points were also made in Martin Kleppmann's recent blog post [1].

[1]: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati...

I think the author glosses over a core problem AI would need to overcome for his thoughts to become reality: training data.

We can't teach AI to code in languages that do not have human ergonomics because, as of now, all AI is based on human example.

Idk why the author thinks that C would be a better language than Rust for vibe coding. Intuitively, I would have thought that the more formal constraints the system imposes, the better for vibe coding (since the more powerful static checks make it harder to write incorrect code).

Of course in practice I think the author is actually correct - LLM's struggle more than humans with sophisticated formal constraints and less than humans with remembering to write a bunch of boilerplate. But I think it's a pretty counterintuitive result and I'd love to have seen more discussion of it.

Obviously right now the best language to use LLMs for, vibe coding or not, is whatever they are most familiar with, although not sure what this actually is! Java?

Going forwards, when LLMs / coding tools are able to learn new languages, then languages designed for machines vs humans certainly makes sense.

Languages designed for robust error detection and checking, etc. Prefer verbosity where it adds information rather than succintness. Static typing vs dynamic. Contractual specification of function input/output guarantees. Modular/localized design.

It's largely the same considerations that make a language good for large team, large code base projects, opposite end of the spectrum to scripting languages, except that if it's machine generated you can really go to town on adding as much verbosity is needed to tighten the specification and catch bugs at compile time vs runtime.

Why should it be the case that LLMs are equally comfortable in x86 Assembly and Python? At least, it doesn't strike me as implausible that working in a human-readable programming language is a benefit for an LLM that is also trained on a bunch of natural language text alongside code.

"If you ask PMs about backend requirements, they will dodge you, and if you ask front-end or web developers, they are waiting for you to provide them the API. The hardest part is understanding the requirements. It's not because of illiteracy. It's because software development is a lot more than coding and requires critical thinking to discover the requirements."

IF this is true, you have bad PMs.

If you want to get to a higher level compiler, prompt fondling will not suffice; you need to master formal specification. Then machine learning algorithms can do the program synthesis to implement the spec. But just talking out your vague software requirements with a chatbot is not analogous to programming.

Also, like others said, even once you have your formal spec, C is a particularly bad choice (unless you want to specify quite a bit more). You want the program implemented in a language with as many safety constraints on it as possible, not one where you have to mentally track memory.

I wish I could convey my thoughts that well!

On the topic: I feel like we still need at least a few more innovations in the space before we can rely on them to work in areas where we as humans still have trouble (that pesky training data!). Even when providing documentation, I still find LLMs to often have trouble creating code in newer versions of libraries.

My biggest fear with LLMs is that it will steer a lot of development into a more homogenous space over time (even just with the types and versions of libraries it chooses when vibing).

I want to do my vibe coding in a dependently typed language, so that at least I can tell what the inputs and outputs are. I say Idris is the future!

Or... I want to only write the tests. The implementation is... an implementation detail!

It is interesting though that if it's all the same anyway - why not write formally proved software. Or write the same spec in three different languages to cross check correctness.

I've wondered what vibe codings impact is to language development, whereas C vs LISP had their tradeoffs when deciding what to use. If everything is vibecoded (not saying it will be) everything probably normalizes to javascript

On fun/joy in the era of agency - https://bikeshedding.substack.com/p/the-agency-continuum

  > Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute

If you’re going to vibe code, why not do it in Brainfuck?

Claude hilariously refused to rewrite my rails codebase in Brainfuck…not that I really expected it to. But it went on a hilarious tirade about how doing so was a horrible idea and I would probably fired if I did.

I have been coding as an autodidact for 20 years now. In the past months, I have been vibe coding a lot, with multiple AIs at the same time. I have achieved to code a full webapp (React and Next.js for the front, RestJS for the back) in five days. Refactoring, adding features and writing the right tests for everything to work has been procuring me with the same problem solving and endorphin kicks as usual programming. Just don't vibe code something which you could do yourself, maybe that is the issue of the author.

I started reading this out of curiosity, thinking: that's such a far fetched thought, I'm curious about what the author wants to say. I think he makes a good point about execution vs. readability, and the actual need for the latter, drawing analogies to earlier abstractions. I'm still skeptical about low level language generation (tbh, letting an LLM handle memory at this point of maturity feels scary to me.. leaks etc)... But overall very interesting writeup and many points that I agree with.

> Why vibe code with a language that has human convenience and ergonomics in view?

Because you would not be able to audit the code if you don't (you'll be terribly slow to read and understand the inner flows correctly and that's if these aren't so bad that would do you some brain damage).

Dang, AI is pushing us all to become managers.

Why not do it in English? I have a "program" that exists entirely as the history of an AI chatbot session. To "run the program" I load the history and a file into the message context and say "Now do this file." It kind of reminds me of a Smalltalk VM in a weird way.

The premise: If people drive drunk already, why not give them even faster cars with less road stability and worse brakes?

I sincerely hope the author is joking.

I have been developing a game with this process, specifically for portability, reach and distribution across multiple game engines and platforms.

I find CUX to be very intuitive for prototyping. But my game is Language and HCI at heart, logic that allows the development process to go smoothly. It is certainly not for everyone or every project.

Along the same lines, I am rewriting a React Native app into native Swift and Kotlin versions. I haven’t written any of the native code directly - it’s all vibed. It’s not C but there’s a lot of upside in letting Claude Code compile my wishes into native languages and skip the RN layer.

It doesn't have problems with undefined behavior, memory safety, or especially thread safety?

That has not been my experience when using Codex, Composer, Claude, or ChatGPT.

Things have just gotten to the point over the last year that the undefined behavior, memory safety, and thread safety violations are subtler and not as blindingly obvious to the person auditing the code.

But I guess that's my problem, because I'm not fully vibing it out.

If the LLMs of today can even produce a sizable C program that compiles, doesn't leak memory, doesn't exhibit UB, doesn't have any obvious vulnerabilities, and is correct, I would be astounded.

Looks like a bad fit to me, it's very freeform and genAI does really badly with consistency and coherence

C is actually pretty good, if you can manage to architect your project cohesively

>Is C the ideal language for vibe coding? I think I could mount an argument for why it is not, but surely Rust is even less ideal

I was really hoping you were going to make this argument, based upon the title of the piece! Still a good read, but if you have the inclination I hope you loop back around to weighing the pros and cons of vibe coding in different languages

"You can do everything in C"

Including shooting yourself in the foot.

/Rust

ive been vibe coding (i think it's vibe coding) in C for the past three weeks and it's been super fun. i was tasked with trying to improve our highly optimized hyper-graph partitioning algorithm. One of the fun things i like to do is feed the llm an academic paper, have it summarize the key pts, and then implement the algos that we (me and the llm) find interesting. This feels like i hit the fabled 10x productivity mark because it would have taken me at least a week (probably more) to digest a paper enough to implement it, and often I would give up, convincing myself it's not worth the time / effort. So 10x might even be a low ball.

Context limit and build time are a couple of reasons. There is C++ code at work I told it to rewrite in Python just to make it easier to vibecode (or regular code) after. Granted, it had no good reason to be in C++ in the first place.

> It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong.

Then show us this robust, complex code that was produced by vibe coding and let us judge for ourselves.

Because, the programming languages best matched to a (natural human language-based) declarative programming paradigm (e.g., vibe coding) would be declarative programming languages, not imperative programming languages.

I guess vibe coding is fun as a meme, but it hides the power of (what someone else on HN) called language user interfaces (LUIs).

The author's point is correct IMO. If you have direct mappings between assembly and natural language, there's no functional need for these intermediate abstractions to act as pseudo-LUIs. If you could implement it, you would just need two layers above assembly: an LLM OS [1], and a LUI-GUI combo.

However, I think there's a non-functional, quality need for intermediate abstractions - particularly to make the mappings auditable, maintainable [2], understandable, etc. For most mappings, there won't be a 1:1 representation between a word and an assembly string.

It's already difficult for software devs to balance technical constraints and possibilities with vague user requirements. I wonder how an LLM OS would handle this, and why we would trust that its mappings are correct without wanting to dig deeper.

[1] Coincidentally, just like "vibe coding", this term was apparently also coined by Andrej Karpathy.

[2] For example, good luck trying to version control vectors.

> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that. Because when you start giving it little programming problems that you can’t be arsed to work out yourself (as I did), you discover (as I did) that it’s awfully good at those. And then one day you muse out loud (as I did) to an AI model something like, “I have an idea for a program…” And you are astounded. If you aren’t astounded, you either haven’t actually done it or you are at some stage of grief prior to acceptance. Perfect? Hardly. But then neither are human coders. The future? I think the questions answers itself.

Tons of people make the above claim and tons of other people make the exact opposite claim that it’s just a search engine and it can’t actually code. I’m utterly shocked at how two people can look at ground truth reality and derive two different factual conclusions. Make no doubt one of these two people is utterly wrong.

The only thing I can conclude is many people are either in denial or outdated. A year ago none of what this man said was true.

At that point, why not develop a custom language or IL that is specifically designed for LLM use and which compiles to good native code?

I propose WASM, or an updated version of it

Since it wasn’t covered in TFA:

for all the same reasons I wouldn’t have done it in C a decade ago!

Plus, now: credit limits!

Cost, right? C uses more tokens by declaring the types. Better to go to a higher level abstraction to use as few tokens as possible to save on $$.

Vibe coding produces great one shot proofs of concept that fit inside its context window.

It produces hot garbage when it needs to bring together two tokens from the far ends of a large code base together.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who understands what the attention mechanism actually is, and as a great surprise to everyone who thinks transformers are AI magic.

I think this is the future. We'll probably end up with some variant of Perl (joking - or am I?)

LLMs have single handedly turned the hardest part of this job into entire job. The hardest part of this job is troubleshooting, maintaining and developing on top of an unfamiliar code base. That's not a new experience for anyone who has lived the production code life. One of the first production engineers I was tutored under used to love to say, "the code should tell you a story."

I love C. I came up on C. But C does not tell you a story. It tells you about the machine. It tells you how to keep the machine happy. It tells you how to translate problems into machine operations. It is hard to read. It takes serious effort to discern its intent.

I think any time you believe the codebase you're developing will have to be frequently modified by people unfamiliar with it, you should reach for a language which is both limiting and expressive. That is, the language states the code intent plainly in terms of the problem language and it allows a limited number of ways to do that. C#, Java (Kotlin) and maybe Python would be big votes from me.

And FYI, I came up on C. One of the first senior engineers I was tutored by in this biz loved to say, good code will tell you a story.

When you're living with a large, long lived codebase, essenti

Vibe Coding is just a stepping stone to No Coding.

No one (other than computer people) wants computers and software, they want results.

This generation of AI will be used to bootstrap the next generation of AI.

Programmers getting excited about vibe coding is like candlemakers getting excited about installing electric lights in their shops, so they can make more candles!

Its very highly probable that AI is going to generate slop at some point so if you dont know much about how it works, you are doomed. Once it starts going towards slop it just keeps getting deeper until you reach a point where every simple problem feels like you need a new repo

While its thought provoking no one can claim to know the future with absolute certainty.

I also don't _love_ vibe coding and do it just for exploration/recreation, but I also have long thought an LLM trained and tuned specifically for a language that is best for LLMs might be ideal.

Currently, using Claude to vibe code Rust is _much_ more hit-or-miss than using it for Python... so Python has become the lingua franca or IR I use with it.

Often I'll ask Claude to implement something in Python, validate and correct the implementation, and in a separate session ask it to translate it from Python to Rust (with my requirements). It often helps.

Claude is particularly bad at hallucinating the APIs of Crates, something it does a lot less for python.

But I have been vibe coding in C. Created a parser/compiler for a subset of the C programming language that compiles to microcode for a novel computing architecture. Could I have done this on my own? Sure, but if I did I would've probably have done it in OCaml. And it would've taken me a lot longer to get it to the point where it is now. I think the advantage of vibe coding this (at least for me) is that I would have a hard time getting started due to procrastination - and I'd have a hard time keeping interested if there wasn't something working (yeah, maybe I'm a little ADHD, but aren't we all at this point?). Vibe coding it got me to something that was working pretty well in a surprisingly short amount of time which tended to make me more engaged without losing interest and attention. I didn't have to get caught up in remembering the intricacies of creating a makefile to build the code, for example. That's one of many places where I can get bogged down.

- C takes a lot more context than a high-level language

- a lot of C code out there is not safe, so the LLM outputs that

- C encodes way less of the programmer's intention, and way more implementation details. So unless the author is extremely good at naming, encapsulating and commenting, the LLM just has less to work with. Not every C code is Sqlite/redis/ffmeg quality.

- the feedback loop is slower, so the LLM has less chance to brute force a decent answer

- there is no npm/pypi equivalent for C on which to train the LLM so the pool for training is less diverse

- the training pool is vastly Linux-oriented, with the linux kernel and distro system libs being very prominent in the training data because C programs on Windows are often proprietary. But most vibe coders are not on Linux, nor into system programming.

Sure, you can vibe code in C. Antirez famously states he gets superb ROI out of it.

But it's likely you'll get even better results with other languages.

So in a way we do TDD and let the vibe machine code the system against the tests :)

Because I can’t debug it and can’t understand it!

Does anybody else feel that vibe coding only works in Python JavaScript, and maybe Go? It seems like once you get more esoteric than that everything goes out the window. Zig code is laughable. I can't get LLMs to write a single cogent function in OCAML, things break catastrophically at 10 LOC. I haven't seen anybody else describe this experience.

ok...then why not just vibe code it in js and then translate it to C with ai

Ah yes just what vibe coding needs, further weakening human oversight

This author, like many others on this site, seem to imply that AI generates "good" code, but it absolutely does not---unless he's running some million dollar subscription model I'm unaware of. I've tested every AI using simple Javascript programs and they all produce erroneous spaghetti slop. I did discover that Claude produces sufficiently decent Haskell code. The point is that the iterative process requires you know the language because you're going to need to amend the code. Therefore vibe in the language you know. Anyone that suggests that AI can produce a solid application on its own is a fraud.

> Why vibe code with a language that has human convenience and ergonomics in view?

Recently I've been preparing a series that teaches how to use AI to assist with coding, and in preparation for that there's this thing I've coded several times in several different languages. In the process of that, I've observed something that's frankly bizarre: I get a 100% different experience doing it in Python vs C#. In C#, the agent gets tripped up in doing all kinds of infrastructure and overengineering blind alleys. But it doesn't do that when I use Python, Go, or Elixir.

My theory is that there are certain habits and patterns that the agents engage with that are influenced by the ecosystem, and the code that it typically reads in those languages. This can have a big impact on whether you're achieving your goals with the activity, either positive or negative.

Do it in Ada, SPARK, Zig, Rust, Pascal, Crystal, etc.

Unless it's an existing project where migration is too costly, C is just entering a time wasting pact along with a lot of other people that like suffering for free.

Because I can do it in Rust that is much closer to the domains I work on?

> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work.

No, it absolutely doesn't. We've seen so much vibe coded slop that it's very clear that vibe coding produces a hot mess which no self respecting person would call acceptable. No idea how you can say this as it isn't remotely true.

> Wouldn’t a language designed for vibe coding naturally dispense with much of what is convenient and ergonomic for humans in favor of what is convenient and ergonomic for machines? Why not have it just write C? Or hell, why not x86 assembly?

In the game we're building we generate, compile and run code (C#) in real time to let the player "train and command" its monster in creative ways. So, I've thought about this.

You need both a popular language and one that has a ton of built-in verifying tools.

The author correctly highlights the former, but dismisses the latter as being targeted to humans. I think it is even more important for LLMs!

These coding agents are excellent at generating plausible solutions, but they have no guarantees whatsoever. So you need to pair them with a verifying system. This can be unit tests, integration tests, static / type checks, formal methods, etc. The point is that if you don't have these "verifier" systems you are creating an open loop and your code will quickly devolve to nonsense [0].

In my view, the best existing languages for vibe coding are: - Rust: reasonably popular, very powerful and strict type system, excellent compiler error messages. If it compiles you can be confident that a whole class of errors won't exist in your program. Best for "serious" programs, but probably requires more back and forths with the coding agent. - TypeScript: extremely popular, powerful type system, ubiquitous. Best for rapid iteration. - Luau: acceptably popular, but typed and embeddable. Best as a real-time scripting sandbox for LLMs (like our use case).

I think there is space for a "Vibe-Oriented Programming" language (VOP as the author says), but I think it will require the dust to settle a bit on the LLM capabilities to understand how much can we sacrifice from the language's lack of popularity (since its new!) and the verifiability that we should endow it with. My bet is that something like AssemblyScript would be the way to go, ie, something very, very similar to an existing, typed popular language (TS) but with extra features that serve the VOP needs.

Another aspect to consider besides verifiability is being able to incrementally analyze code. For structured outputs, we can generate guaranteed structures thanks to grammar-based sampling. There are papers studying how to use LSPs to guide LLM outputs at the token level [1] . We can imagine analyzers that also provide context as needed based on what the LLM is doing, for example there was this recent project that could trace all upstream and downstream information flow in a program thanks to Rust's ownership features [2].

Finally, the importance of a LLM-coding friendly sandbox will only increase: we already are seeing Anthropic move towards using LLMs to generate script as a way to make tool calls rather than calling tools directly. And we know that verifiable outputs are easier to hillclimb. So coding will get increasingly better and probably mediate everything these agents do. I think this is why Anthropic bought Bun.

[0] very much in the spirit of the LLM-Modulo framework: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01817 [1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/6... [2] https://cel.cs.brown.edu/paper/modular-information-flow-owne...

I asked ChatGPT what traits should vibe-oriented programming language have and oh boy did it deliver.

(https://chatgpt.com/share/693891af-d608-8002-8b9b-91e984bb13...)

* boring and straightforward syntax and file structure: no syntax sugar, aliases, formatting freedom that humans cherish, but machines are getting confused, no context-specific syntax.

* explicitness: no hidden global state, shortcuts and UB

* basic static types and constraints

* tests optimized for machine evaluation

etc.

Forward declaration is the only reason why I moved away from C, so much time wasted..

filthy vibe coder here

I'm planning to, why bother with react when I can jump straight into WASM?

I wish everyone would read this paragraph:

> But this leads me to my second point, which I must make as clearly and forcefully as I can. Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that. Because when you start giving it little programming problems that you can’t be arsed to work out yourself (as I did), you discover (as I did) that it’s awfully good at those. And then one day you muse out loud (as I did) to an AI model something like, “I have an idea for a program…” And you are astounded. If you aren’t astounded, you either haven’t actually done it or you are at some stage of grief prior to acceptance. Perfect? Hardly. But then neither are human coders. The future? I think the questions answers itself.

This cannot be repeated enough. For all the AI hype, if you think AI isn't the most useful programming tool invented in the last 20 years, you're ignorant of the SOTA or deeply in denial.

As @tptacek recently wrote:

> All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.

If you're vibe coding, I highly recommend TDD. It makes it very easy for a coding agent to iterate on it. You gotta bonk it sometimes when it tries to delete a problematic test etc, but hallucinating a test suite along with your app really helps a lot. (I've been vibe coding a scripting language/compiler for a video game project I'm working on in this way, and it's been fascinating and mostly great.)

My concept was to build HLL to C/C++ (or Rust) translators using mostly, non-AI tech. Then, use AI's with whatever language they were really good at. Then, transpile it.

Alternatively, use a language like ZL that embeds C/C++ in a macro-supporting, high-level language (eg Scheme). Encode higher level concepts in it with generation of human-readable, low-level code. F* did this. Now, you get C with higher-level features we can train AI's on

When building cli and infrastructure tools and using AI my goto is go. Pardon the pun.

I came to this article expecting an investigation on how C or assembly performs with an LLM, but it is just musings. The article claims the LLM is better at memory management than a human, which I find dubious, but even then it would not be a good argument in favor of C.

My experience with LLMs is that they are not good at tracking resources and perform much better with languages that reduce cognitive load for humans.

Fascinating.

I would appreciate a post with examples, not just prose. It helps to put things in a more grounded reality.

> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong.

I spend all day in Claude Code, and use Codex as a second-line code reviewer.

They do not create robust systems. They’ve been a huge productivity boost for me in certain areas, but as soon as you stop making sure you understand every line it’s writing, or give it a free reign where you’re not auto-approving everything, the absolute madness sets in.

And then you have to unpick it when it’s trying to read the source of npm because it’s decided that’s where the error in your TypeScript project must lie, and if you weren’t on top of the whole thing from the start, this will be very difficult.

Don’t vibe-code in C unless you are a very strong C developer who can reliably catch subtle bugs in other people’s code. These things have no common sense.

Ehem, hell yeah.

The author makes 2 fundamental errors in reasoning. The first is saying that the language model can program, it can't, it can generate code, maybe researchers at top labs can get it to create some trivial programs but I digress.

The second and more important point is that what makes coding simpler for humans is the ability of the language to facilitate communication so you don't have to translate, now LLMs are good at translation, but it's still work. Imagine you have an implementation of a program and you want to see what it does, for any non-trival program you must scan millions of tokens, are current LLMs even physcially capable of attending to that? nonono we need names.

Besides how can you even vibecode if you aren't (just) using names.

the last thing people need is another foot gun in C code

> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong.

This is such a bad take. I'm convinced that engineers simply don't understand what the job is. The point was never "does it output code that works", the point is "can it build the right thing in a way that is maintainable and understandable". If you need an LLM to understand the output then you have failed to engineer software.

If all you're doing is spitting out PoCs and pure greenfield development then I'm sure it looks very impressive, as the early language models did when it looked like they were capable of holding a conversation. But 99% of software engineering is not that kind of work.

> why not do it in C?

A legitimate point, there are lots of performance and fine grain changes you can make, and it's a simple, common language many people use. Perhaps we could realize some of these benefits from a simple, fast language.

> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

A terrible take imo. This would be impossible to debug and it's complex enough you likely won't see any performance improvements from writing in assembly. It's also not portable, meaning you'd have to rewrite it for every OS you want to compile on.

I think there's an argument that if machines are writing code, they should write for a machine optimized language. But even using this logic I don't want to spend a bunch of time and money writing multiple architectures, or debugging assembly when things go wrong.

It’s easy to answer why old-fashioned programming feels better to many people. It’s just alienation, or rather the relative lack of. It’s fulfilling to do things in a way that makes you feel like you have agency and are causing things to happen in ways that make sense to your own sense organs. It doesn’t even matter if “you” are doing it or “the tools” are doing the heavy lifting—who are you anyway, your thoughts, your tiny conscious mind on top of the iceberge of the unconscious?—, so you don’t have to get into the stupid quagmire ranging from “but abstractions and compilers” to “but Kant showed that thing-in-itself is different from the thing-as-sensed”, no, it’s fine, really; we all know (sense) when we feel in control or not.

But anyway. That’s all besides the point. Because the progress apologists[1] come in all shapes and forms (we are lead to believe), now also uber-passionate college professor who aah loves programming as much as the day he met her. But unlike you he’s a hard-prostheticed pragmatist. He both knows and sympathises with your “passion” but is ready to assert, in a tptacek-memetic style, that it is the way it is—and if you think otherwise (pause for effect), you are wrong.

Because don’t you see? Why are you so blind? No, we can’t let the chips fall as they may and just send you a “told you so” letter once everything you know-now is resolutely quaint. No, we must assert it right now. (So you don’t miss out on the wonderful ride.)

Aah the text complains. It saddens me to think of “coding by hand” becoming a kind of quaint Montessori-school... Oh, the twists and turns of the turbulent text, so organic. Just like your mind. But awake.

The room is at this point drenched in a mist of farts. Yes, programming by-hand, I think we ought to call it a quaintism at this point.

And did you know: people used to resist mechnical computers. Hmm? Yes, indeed, favoring people computers. The text prompts for another model to make an image of a person smirking so hard that their eyes become kind of diagonal and their cheeks disappear. But not in an evil cartoon character way. In a human way. That three years ago felt slightly off-putting. Now just looks like, well, you know.

- - -

Ahh. (Again.) These fools. With their hand-coding. Do they really think they will be employable three years from now? Well, no matter. I have a PhD from MIT along with my associate professorship. I only came out here to Iowa Community College because of my disabled son. Needed more time with him. And to get away from dat citation grind. Man. I have many organic hobbies. And a few very, really incredibly specific collections, as is fitting. puffs pipe Mmm yeah what do I care, so what if programming is quaint now—I’m already in my “ivory tower”, baby. People will listen to my takes on AI. They are appropriately detached, informal, just saying it like it is, you know? And if they don’t? Well, there’s an army of texts right behind me. They’ll be convinced to suppress any feelings of alienation eventually. Eventually, there will just be their own vanishing, small-minded, petty, “thoughts” on the matter. That tiny holdout. Against all content they can sense.

[1] Insert scare quotes here. All history is whitewashed. “We” progressed and defeated “them”. It’s all just a linear curve. No critical thinking is supposed to occur here. Those idiots thirty years ago used reusable underwear and had to load detergent into a washing machine and then even bend over to turn on a “button” to make the underwear reusable. Our underwear costs fifty cents, is made from the most comfortable plastic you can get, and dissolves and crumbles when it gets into contact with water; down the bathroom drain it goes.

At some point in a career, one begins to encourage people to try replacing you and your team. Mostly, senior people become aware they are not there as some sort of fungible office decoration. Just do it... call the Managers bluff... the worst outcome is the team finds a better firm with someone smarter.

It was Schadenfreude watching the CEO's son (LLM guys) implode a public-facing production server ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect .)

Slop content about slop code is slop recursive. Languages like C are simply very unforgiving to amateurs, and naive arbitrary code generators. Bad workmanship writes bad code in any language. Typically the "easier" the compiler is to use... the more complex the failure mode. =3

Vibe coders usually offer zero workmanship, and are enamored with statistically salient generated arbitrary content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

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i am not going to vibe code

This is such a bad take I don't even know where to start... Even if you think vibe coding _is_ the future, there are still so many things wrong about this article. It's like the author has a fundamental misunderstanding why we even create programming languages.

>Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work.

No it doesn't. Just for the fun of it because I'm somewhat familiar with the VLC codebase I tried to fix some bugs with "agentic tooling" and "vibe coding". And it just produces crap. Which is one metric I'd propose for the usefulness of these tools, why aren't they fixing real bugs in the large open source codebases of this world? You'd be a hero, VLC has like 4000 open issues.

The answer is of course because these tools, in particular in manual memory managed languages which the author proposes to use, don't work at all. Maybe they work on a toy project of 500 lines of code, which is all every demo ever produces, but these text based systems have no actual understanding of the hardware underlying a complex program. That's just not how they work.