People are using different definitions of "vibe coding". If you expect to just prompt without even looking at the code and being involved in the process the result will be crap. This doesn't preclude the usefulness of models as tools, and maybe in the future vibe coding will actually work. Essentially every coder I respect has an opinion that is some shade of this.
There are the social media types you mention and their polar opposites, the "LLMs have no possible use" crowd. These people are mostly delusional. At the grown-ups table, there is a spectrum of opinions about the relative usefulness.
It's not contradictory to believe that the average programmer right now has his head buried in the sand and should at least take time to explore what value LLMs can provide, while at the same time taking a more conservative approach when using them to do actual work.
>maybe in the future vibe coding will actually work
Vibe coding works today at small enough of scale.
I'm building a personal app to help me track nutrition and I only needed to get involved in the code when Claude would hit its limits for a single file and produced a broken program (and this was via the UI, not Claude Code.) Now at ~3000 lines of python.
After I told it to split it into a few files I don't think I've had to talk about anything at the code level. Note that I eventually did switch to using Claude Code which might have helped (gets annoying copy/pasting multiple files and then my prompts hit max limits).
I just prompt it like an experienced QA/product person to tell it how to build it, point out bugs (as experienced as a user), point out bad data, etc.
A few of my recent prompts (each is a separate prompt):
>for foods found but not in database, list the number of times each shows up
>sort the list by count descending
>Period surplus/deficit seems too low. looking at 2025/07/24 to 2025/07/31
>do not require beige color (but still track it). combine blue/purple as one in stats (but keep separate colors). data has both white and White; should use standard case and not show as two colors
There are the social media types you mention and their polar opposites, the "LLMs have no possible use" crowd. These people are mostly delusional. At the grown-ups table, there is a spectrum of opinions about the relative usefulness.
It's not contradictory to believe that the average programmer right now has his head buried in the sand and should at least take time to explore what value LLMs can provide, while at the same time taking a more conservative approach when using them to do actual work.