> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that.

… well, you are wrong.

I recently gave the "vibe" AI the assignment of "using GTK [4, I think], establish a global shortcut key".

No amount of massaging the prompt, specifying the version of GTK, etc. could prevent it from just outright hallucinating the functions it wanted to call into existence. The entire reason I was asking was because I did not know what function to call, and was having difficulty discerning that from GTK's documentation. (I know how to do this now, and it is effectively undocumented.)

Prior to that, an assignment to determine some information from Alembic. Again, the AI desired to just hallucinate the functions it required into existence.

A script to fetch the merge queue length from GH. It decided to call GH's GraphQL API, which is fine, and doable for the task, but the query was entirely hallucinated.

A bash script to count files change in git. The code ran, and the output was wrong. The author did not check the LLM's code.

Even non-programming tasks are the same. Image generation is a constant fight of trying to get the AI to understand what you mean, or it just ignoring your prompts, etc. I went about 10 prompts trying to get an image with a stone statue of 4 ASCII characters in a field. The last character was consistently just wrong, and no amount of prompting to fix.

"Generate a character with a speech bubble that says 'Hi'" -> speech bubble has Japanese in it! (And the Japanese is gibberish, but if you ask AI to translate it, it "will".)