Vibe coder that reads hacker news chiming in here. I think that the true usefullness of LLMs for coding is often lost on the usual audience of this website, because most people here have extremely high standards of what they expect LLMs to accomplish.

But take people like me, I am an MD who was always into computers, but that just ended up going down a separate series of life decision, and could never find the time or energy to actually learn to code. When GPT-4 arrived, I started trying out using it for a medically-related coding hobby project, which eventually escalated into an ongoing PhD. Now, the fact is that this whole thing would just never have happened without LLMs. I would have never even thought of starting such a project, and if I did I wouldn't have had the time, and would have never made any progress even if I did. Vibe coding enabled me to do something entirely outside the scope of my previous capabilities. And the reality is that if I hadn't been able to do everything myself (down to the point of installing hardware managing the servers I am using), the project as a whole just wouldn't have happened.

The code I produce isn't going into production anywhere, it is only used for my particular purposes, it is not exposed to the web in any way, and so typical LLM issues like security etc. are a non-issue. And while my understanding of what my code is actually doing is pretty rudimentary (for instance, basic syntax conventions is something I just never bothered to learn), this doesn't really matter in practice. If it works it works.