Vibe Coding Is The Evolution Of Programming

So, I think we got to stop with some of the hate as far as some of these AI tools, some of these chat assistants, these large language models, things like chat GBT and Gemini and Clawude and Llama. Now, I use all of those and I use all of those in a variety of different ways, including scripting and programming because I am not really a a programmer. I can do a little programming. I know a little bit about a few different programming languages, but I'm not somebody that is a serious programmer. I don't work in that field and I'm not somebody that really wants to ever work in that field or know that much about programming. I don't want to actually uh have to learn that stuff, right? So these tools like chat GPT and Gemini, these things are great. If I want, for example, to create a program and in a language I don't know, I can just tell, for example, Google's Gemini, I can tell it, hey, create this program that does this in this language for me. And within seconds, it spits a program out. You know, something that would take me potentially weeks because I'd have to potentially learn the language a little bit and learn some of the nuances, right? It would take me seriously several weeks to do some of this stuff that these things can do within a few seconds. One of the things with a lot of these AI tools, there is a lot of haters out there and they have these derogatory names for things. For example, you've probably heard the term AI slop. you know, anything that you create using an AI tool, whether it be uh generating a a text uh or image or a video, it's AI slop because a real person didn't create that or a real person didn't create that the traditional way. They had to use this AI tool and you know, it's AI slop. Basically, it's garbage because AI was involved in it. We kind of have this with programming as well. Anytime you do any kind of scripting or programming using a AI tool, they call it quote vibe coding because you're coding based on vibes, right? And this is actually this uh term was basically coined by this person here, Andre Carpathy. He wrote this back in February of 2025. So, this is just a few months old. He posted a tweet that became very popular on this. There's a new kind of coding that I call vibe coding where you fully give in to the vibes. You embrace exponentials and you forget that the code even exists. And he goes on and on to write about what vibe coding is. But it's essentially just what he said. You're vibing on codes. It's all about the feels, right? You don't know anything about coding itself. It's just all based on vibe. And that term kind of caught on vibe coding. And you know, anytime somebody talks about, "Hey, Chat GPT helped me write this script." Hey, he's a vibe coder, right? And for me, I don't think this should be a derogatory kind of thing. I actually think vibe coding should actually be embraced. I think it's the future. I have done a lot of vibe coding in the past few months, right? It it has become something that is a normal kind of activity for me. And if you understand how to use it, it's a beautiful thing. First of all, it's not coding in the traditional sense. You know, when you're vibe coding, when you're using a tool like chat GPT, for example, you're basically giving chat GBT what you want. You you want the end goal result. You know, I want the program that does this. Help me get that program, right? And it's basically it it leans on intuition and pattern recognition, fast iteration, right? It's about letting the code just kind of emerge, right? you just happen to eventually get to the end goal while you're conversing with CHP. It's basically kind of like you're an architect and you're building a house with no blueprint, right? And that's kind of what you're doing when you're vibe coding. You go into it, there's no real plan. You kind of know what you want, but in some cases, you don't know exactly what you want. You meander around until you finally get to a product that you're like, "Hey, this right here, this works for me. I'm good." It's not about uh being correct. It's not about correct code or clean code, right? Matter of fact, you can do this without knowing anything about coding. Now, for me, I know enough about programming. I go look at the code and uh notice obvious things that could be improved on, you know, things that could be refactored. But if you don't know any coding at all, I mean, you're not worried about the correctness of the code or the cleanliness of the code, right? You don't have to understand the code even, right? Somebody that knows nothing about programming can do some vibe coding. And I can actually show you a couple of realworld examples that I went through last night. I I decided I was going to do some quick and dirty vibe coding um for real world use, but also for purposes of this video. So I asked Google's Gemini. Basically, I wanted to create a Emacs run launcher similar to Dmenu or ROI. So you guys know what ROI is. It's a command line run launcher. Let me run this. This here, this is actually not ROI. This is actually Emacs, right? It's kind of glitching out here. Let me escape out of that. The code is a little buggy, but this is not a finished product here. What I was doing, but I basically told Gemini, hey, I'm running Arch Linux. I want to use the Emacs mini buffer window as a run launcher similar to ROI. I told it, you know, kind of I gave it a function that I had in one of my EMAC scripts. And you know, I basically said, "Hey, can you possibly use this and maybe flesh this out a little more?" And we went back and forth a lot because Jim and I gave me some things that were buggy. At first, the first couple of iterations of this, I would get this kind of window here, but then I would also get a second Emacs window with the initial buffer come up, which obviously was not something I wanted. I I want my run launcher, but I don't want other Emacs windows coming up with this. So we had to flesh out that problem, we had to solve that problem. And then we eventually got to where this would open without another Emacs window opening. But when I would select a program to run, for example, maybe I selected, you know, the Brave browser or something, it would open Brave and then it would also open a second Emacs window along with it. So that was another bug. So, you know, we kept encountering bugs. Kept encountering bugs. And then I had to find a way to keybind it so I could use this in my um Qile config. And right now, by the way, these windows that sometimes bug out. That is because I actually have a different EMAC window open on a different screen. So, it's actually causing u that issue. If I close my other Emacs window, uh that run launcher does work somewhat. It's not perfect. One thing, it is a little slow. And partly the reason it's a little slow is because when you exit out of something in Emacs, for example, if I escape, it takes like a second or two for that exit signal to go to Emacs and actually close the program. And that's actually a design of Emacs. So, it's not quite as peppy as something like Dmenu or ROI. Uh because there is a delay anytime you hit escape. I can disable the escape or I could tell uh Google's Gemini to disable where escape immediately kills the program. But by default in Emacs, it's there's a little delay on the escape key. We've got a lot of chat log here. Lots of different example snippets of code. Some worked, some didn't. Some half ass worked. And I told it, hey, I needed you to improve the code. I can actually show you what we ended up doing. So, let me navigate to my uhconfig/ac folder here. And then I've got some scripts and app launchers. And I've got various functions in here. And me and Gemini created several different kind of functions, including one, it created one for me to get my Brave bookmarks. So, I've got my uh Brave bookmarks inside Emacs, which is kind of a neat little function. And I'm I'm not sure if I would actually use this, but it was a proof of concept, the fact that that works. Now, after playing with this for a couple of hours last night, I don't know if I would ever fully replace ROI with Emacs as a run launcher. Uh because, you know, it's just it's got some issues. It's got some quirkiness to it. But this was again something kind of cool, right? I I gave Jim and I an idea I was thinking about and you know we started playing around and we got a whole bunch of code a whole bunch of Emacs lisp code all of those custom functions that I could have never written myself well I won't say that I could have written it myself it would have taken me [snorts] quite a lot of time and then I also asked a different chat assistant I went to chat GPT and I got the idea of this hey I'm I think I'm just going to stick with Roi but I have this idea can I have a roy launcher that lists all the meta x programs in Emacs. So in Emacs, if you go back to Emacs here, meta X, and I get this command prompt, right? And it lists all the thousands and thousands of Emacs programs that I have available for me inside my Emacs, all the functions in Emacs, and there's probably thousands of them. And then I got the idea, I want a roy that brings up MetaX in Emacs. And with the help of chat GPT, I ended up getting that. So, let me actually run this script. Let me cd into this uh folder that I have here. If I do an ls, I have this program emac for meta x.sh. It's a shell script. And if I run that, it launches ROI. And then the ROI menu here, all of this stuff, these are EMAC programs. It's the output from that. And if I want to, I can run one of these. So, we can run the standard find file command from Emacs. And let me actually find the proper find file. It's right here. And if I hit enter on that, it opens Emacs and it runs the find file command, right? You see down here, it's running the find file command where I can navigate to some file. For example, actually, I could just have opened that script for you. Let's go ahead and open that. You can see it's not a lot of code. This is very simple. This is something I asked chat GPT for and in less than a second it spit that out. I put that in a file. I I made it executable and now I've got this cool little ROI menu that gives me the Emacs meta X command right here in ROI. Now again, is this something that I would seriously use? Probably not. But again, I these were fun little scripts and I could see myself eventually finding uh some really cool stuff where I asked one of these chat assistants to do things that, you know, maybe would seriously change my workflow and become something that I would actually use on a regular basis. So, if you're one of these people that kind of look down on these chat assistants and these large language models, and if you look down on people that vibe code, uh I I think you need to reconsider. Vibe coding has a place. Vibe coding can actually be extremely useful, especially when you're trying to again explore an idea. You don't really know where you're going. You're just kind of letting the code happen. Maybe you're not a programmer at all. You don't know anything about coding. Maybe you have an idea, but you don't know how to get there, right? Sometimes it's just about uh just going back and forth with one of these chat assistants, bouncing ideas off the chat assistant. Now, obviously, are there some downsides to vibe coding? Yeah, you could potentially end up in a situation where the program that it comes up with has some malicious code. For me, I know enough about programming. I can usually read these scripts that it spits out. so I can go through the code myself and spot things that might be an issue. If you're not one of these people, just know there is some risk you're taking by just blindly running these programs that these chat assistants spit out. There could be some fragile behavior, right? The script could not work. That's always a risk, but a lot of times whatever it spits out the first time is either not going to work at all or it's not going to work the way you intended because sometimes you just don't give the chat assistant enough detail, right? You tell it, hey, I want you to create a program that does this. You don't give it a whole lot of details, and it does what you told it to do. You know, it'll create that program, but not really in the way that you intended because you didn't give it enough specificity. But I think this stuff is going to become extremely common place going forward. I think I could see a world where vibe coding becomes normal for even professional programmers because why not, you know, especially for something quick and dirty. Hey, I'm just going to uh use some VI coding just to kind of shape where things are going, just to let the thing happen. And then later when I need to develop the program in proper form, we can do some refactoring. You can even use the chat assistant to help you refactor the code later. But at first, you just want to get to the end goal as quickly as you can. In my opinion, it's it's very much like that architect that is just sketching some blueprints, right? it's not, you know, going to be the official plan for the building, right? At first when he's just sketching things out, he's just kind of spitballing it and then later he'll go back and refine it. I think that's what vibe coding will be for programmers. So, there you have it. Just some of my thoughts. Before I go, I need to thank the producers of this episode. Matt, Steve, George, Dar, Lee, Mark, Methos, Uran, Peace, Arch, and Fedor, Roland, Warrenu, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about vibe coding wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, even free and open source software that I create using Vibe Coding, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.