I am very much in favor of anything that makes software engineering more accessible. I have no principled objection to vibe coding. The problem I have with vibe coding is practical: it's producing more low quality code rather than allowing people to achieve more than they previously could.
Almost everything I've seen achieved with vibe coding so far has been long since achievable with low / no code platforms. There is a great deal of value in the freedom that vibe coding gives (and for that reason, I am in favor of it) but the missing piece of this criticism of the criticism is that vibe coding is not the only way to write these simple scripts and it is the least reliable way.
Vibe coding as the future is an uninspired vision of the future. The future is less code, not more.
After watching a sales person and a PM vibe code I’ll say that existing developers are not the initial for vibe coding. Vibe coding absolutely allows non-devs to achieve more than they previously could.
The issue is one of education, not possibility. There is so much hype around vibe coding that it has penetrated non-technical circles and given non-technical people the confidence to try and make things. The same people could use Zapier or Airtable or Tally or Retool or Bubble or n8n to achieve their goals but they didn't have the confidence to do so, or knowledge of the tooling.
> Almost everything I've seen achieved with vibe coding so far has been long since achievable with low / no code platforms.
I tried showing someone Bubble as a solution to a fairly simple workflow (one form input, a few LLM calls, an output) that they should have been able to build in minutes.
It was a horrific experience, as Bubble can't find the right balance between being "no-code" (simple) and "powerful enough" with customizations. The end result is that in my experience a non-technical person just can't get workflows to work in Bubble without investing a massive number of hours.
In comparison, getting this done with either vanilla Claude.ai or Lovable is a *single* prompt. Just one!
I think you are deeply underestimating the difference for true non-technical users. Or even bored/overwhelmed technical users who need something done that's non-mission-critical and would just never get done if it took hours of messing with a no-code GUI, vs. dictating it through whisper and letting the AI agent go at it.
Almost everything I've seen achieved with vibe coding so far has been long since achievable with low / no code platforms. There is a great deal of value in the freedom that vibe coding gives (and for that reason, I am in favor of it) but the missing piece of this criticism of the criticism is that vibe coding is not the only way to write these simple scripts and it is the least reliable way.
Vibe coding as the future is an uninspired vision of the future. The future is less code, not more.