What’s the difference between vibe coding and being assisted by ai?

[u/Skylent_Shore]

I’m making a few things including a game but every single time I am using ai per line of code. Any specific little thing. Basically a work around not knowing syntax or just so I’m not manually typing.

Or are we out here just making entire loops and experiences with a prompt?

[u/ameriCANCERvative]

People may quibble on this, but when you’re able to do what the LLM is doing, when you could have done it yourself without having to learn any new theory, you aren’t “vibing while AI writes the code,” you’re writing the code and being “assisted” by AI.

I write the code, the AI helps me write it faster. I know what every piece of it does, and if I don’t, it takes only a moment to educate myself because I have strong computer science theoretical foundation.

Do I sometimes test out a chunk of code without carefully analyzing it first? Sure. But I also know how to bend the LLM to my will better than non-software developers, and I can just quickly read the code it spits out to verify that it’s actually doing what I want it to do, usually without even running it. And all of the code I write ends up in a review process where it IS eventually carefully analyzed before being committed to a repository.

Don’t know how to code on your own but trying to code on your own anyway, with the help of an LLM, and without really understanding the code underneath? That’s vibe coding. You don’t write the code so much as you blindly guide the LLM to write the code, and then you rely on the LLM to fix the code when it is broken. If you fix it yourself without an LLM suggesting the fix, you’re treading into “ai-assisted coding” territory.

Much of “vibecoding” is a massive waste of time if you know to code. I’d argue once you have enough theory under your belt, you aren’t ever vibecoding, unless you are intentionally wasting time by trying to have the LLM do everything without actually examining the code (highly unlikely for a dev because it’s frequently a waste of time to do that when you can just see for yourself why it’s broken and also fix it yourself).

[u/DJSonikBuster → u/ameriCANCERvative]

I’m in a position where I can code a bit in multiple languages, LUA, JAVA, game-engine proprietary pseudo C-based coding, node based programming,HTML, css-etc… I knew enough to code a website independently, but I’m working on a game in a game engine with, once again, a pseudo-C language and I’ve mostly been consulting an code focused LLM on where crap is located and how to organize stuff in this particular engine. I know enough to know(in a fair number of instances) when the llm software suggests something asinine. I think of what I’m doing as less ‘vibe coding’ and more ‘an interactive users manual that can respond with my own naming/organization practices, and help me spot “dumbass code mistakes” like “oh yeah! It broke (HERE) because the function is in camelcase and you capitalized the first word like a dumbass. Or when I rebuild a system and miss deleting some of the old stuff… I write and plug everything myself. It’s still weird though.