this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Have I misunderstood the term vibe coder? I thought it meant people who weren't good at coding. I thought Stark's whole thing was that he's a genius. Is he notoriously bad at software but good with hardware or something?
vibe coding is when you let an llm write almost all your code, taking its output at face value. tony stark in the films just vaguely describes to his computer what he wants and trusts that it does the right thing.
I think the underlying understanding is that Tony wrote the AI he’s asking to write the code. So, in effect, the AI he built is a form of scripting. Rather than spending his time churning out code, the AI will churn out code that’s up to his standard because he wrote the AI.
This was my understanding, too. Dude created his own hardware and software and then hand rolled an AI so he had more time to spend saving the world instead of hunched over a laptop. Anything he tells his own AI to do would probably be trivial to him to write himself but would take us months.
From my understanding a vibe coder is someone who builds software using mainly AI generated code. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad coder, but often the code generated by AI is just hard to process at this scale and people will have no clue what exactly is going on in their project.
if they build software using mainly ai generated code, then they are a bad coder
Even if you're the one that built, programmed, and trained the AI when nothing else like it existed?
So? Some of the people pushing out ai slop would be perfectly capable of writing their own llm out of widely available free tools. Contrary to popular belief, they are not complex pieces of software, just extremely data hungry. Does not mean they magically understand the code output by the llm when it spits out something.
Stark would have developed their own way of training their AI. It wouldn't be an LLM in the first place.
and he stil wouldn't understand its output. Because as we clearly see, he doesn't even try to look at it.
What if it were just a really big Expert system?
That's usually the thing that you call AI players or COM players in computer games.
given that expert systems are pretty much just a big ball of if-then statements, then he might be considered to have written the app. Just with way more extra steps.
so? someone invented current llms too. Nothing like them existed before either. If they vibe coded with them they'd still be producing slop.
Coding an llm is very very easy. What's not easy is having all the data, hardware and cash to train it.
Yeah but the people who made it like that probably understand whether to trust it to write code or not. The AI Tony wrote, he knows what it does best and he trusts it to write his code. Just because it's AI doesn't mean it's LLM. Like I trust the errors compilers give me even if I didn't write them because it's good. And I trust my scripts to do things that I wrote them for, specifically since I tested them. Same with the AI you yourself made, you'd test it, and you'd know the design principles.
an ai is not a script. You can know what a script does. neural networks don't work that way. You train them, and hope you picked the right dataset for it to hopefully learn what you want it to learn. You can't test it. You can know that it works sometimes but you also know that it will also not work sometimes and there'sjacksjit you can do about it. A couple of gigabytes of floating point numbers is not decipherable to anyone.
And who says AI means neural network? That's what we use, doesn't mean that's the only AI possible to write. There are a lot of different models, neural network is popular right now because it can learn from data without anyone having to teach it actual logic. An AI written by fictional character can be a deterministic kind with very similar logic to humans that you can inspect and write and give weights to things.
Even if they build the AI doing it from scratch, all by themselves?
yes. Because that would still mean they didn't code the app.
"killing is bad!" "but what if the murderer 3d printed his own gun?"
More like: "killing is bad" "but what if the 'murderer' designed, build and produced their own target?"
You can't kill a robot, so it isn't killing.
the "target" is to get useful software out. The ai is the tool. In this example, the ai is the gun. It is the tool used to achieve the goal.
Anyone can make an improvised hammer. Stick a rock or a piece of metal on a stick. But that doesn't make them carpenters, even though they made their own tools.
Javis, his AI assistant, did all the work.
Except that he made Jarvis. Meaning he understands perfectly his tool's abilities and limitations... Which vibe coders don't.
Yes, but he also programmed Jarvis... So...
I feel like you're really forgetting the lore. Do you not remember the iconic "TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BULD THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BIX OF SCRAPS." He built a compact arc reactor in a cave. The other man's reply as to why he couldn't do it in a lab with more scientists and equipment was "I'm not Tony Stark."
https://youtu.be/9foB2z_OVHc