this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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I think it depends on who you ask. Some people who "vibe code" definitely use it as a crutch for a lack of understanding. But others (often more senior) tend to use it as just a really really complex auto-complete. Mostly it generates chunks and patterns but the ideas and how those pieces connect come from the dev
I feel like not knowing what you're doing is a critical piece of the vibe coding definition tho. If a sr developer is using AI, understands the code generated, and can manipulate it in a secure, industry standard way, then that's just a developer.
Vibe coding is shit, and will always be shit no matter who is doing it.
Edit: The mods decided my other comment was too controversial... "I'm an engineer to genius" apparently thats too controversial for this site 🙄
Totally disagree. Your position is way too overly simplistic and naive.
An engineer only builds a bridge as strong as it needs to be, and likewise I “vibe code” things based on how few fucks I need to give.
I’m experienced and can review the output for sanity and completion. I can test it, I can rewrite it, etc.
Stop looking at vibe coding as doing the whole thing, it’s more valuable as the glue between things, or to create scripts tools that make you more efficient.
And you can vibe code entire apps that basically just work these days. You probably don’t want to maintain those apps but thats a question of lifecycle planning.
It is so much faster to vibe code an API integration and a suite of tests than I can write. It’s faster to write a functional jq or bash script.
But it’s also much much much worse at doing data viz or writing pandas code because it’s trained on 10,000 shitty medium blogs.
You really have to know what you’re doing and what the model is doing, but it is not universally trash.
And if you don’t believe me, put $20 into the Claude API and install Claude Code and ask it to build something.
You aren't vibe coding if you refactor and test properly...
why do you guys always just move the goalposts?
“X thing isn’t real AI, because real AI sucks and I might have to concede the positive attributes of X about AI generally… [OCR, chess bots, etc.]”
“Y thing isn’t real vibe coding, because real vibing coding sucks and I might have to concede the positive attributes of Y about vibe coding…”
like… you seem like you’ve just decided these things are “bad things” in your head and just shift your definitions the moment you meet reality and see anything that might evoke cognitive dissonance about it.
"Vibe coding" has a pretty specific definition, which includes not understanding the code. So writing tests, or correcting the code both disqualify a piece of work from being technically "vibe coded".
Usage by scientists to do pattern matching and by language models to replicate natural sounding language and a bunch of other AI is neat and useful but the AI is not literally intelligent as described by the people that are dumping LLMs into settings they are not actually useful for like regurgitating accurate facts.
When we criticize AI in situations like this it is because they are using a tape ruler to hammer in a nail and then taking away people's hammers and replacing them with tape measures and then we find out they stole all the tape measures.
We are complaining about a combination of what it is and how it is used. We also want to make sure that a term that means something stupid is clearly used for that stupid thing and doesn't lose meaning because they have some vaguely related usage. Using a hammer put pound in a nail and using the hammers claw to pull a nail out are two different things even if they both use a nail.
Where as you seem to think anyone criticizing shitty use of AI means all AI that exists instead of understanding context.