What shall we call vibe coders now?

Someone awful used to be full of awe. Being gay is no longer being joyful, in particular for closeted conservatives unless, perhaps, they're visiting the RNC. Ambidextrous now means you're able to use both your left and right hands equally well, and not that you're a duplicitous, two-faced cow.

The list goes on, and now vibe coding joins them after just ~9 months. Although to be fair, it's not quite as drastic a change as the examples above.

Vibe coding is supposed to mean the practice of accepting/using LLM generated code without checking it. The term was popularized by Andrej Karpathy, a Slovakian computer scientist who co-founded the current bane of all of our lives, OpenAI: 

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

- Andrej Karpathy on Feb 3, 2025

And for clarity, this was a widely accepted definition (courtesy of Wikipedia, formatting added):

Vibe coding describes a chatbot-based approach to creating software where the developer describes a project or task to a large language model (LLM), which generates code based on the prompt. The developer does not review or edit the code, but solely uses tools and execution results to evaluate it and asks the LLM for improvements. Unlike traditional AI-assisted coding or pair programming, the human developer avoids examination of the code, accepts AI-suggested completions without human review, and focuses more on iterative experimentation than code correctness or structure.

And yep you guessed it, that produces pretty shoddy code with the most basic and silly security and regulatory issues. At the time of writing, it's akin to a pre-junior programmer which I like to facetiously refer to as worse than a junior dev instructing a toddler to go away and write code. Regardless, language evolves and Collins Dictionary captured this recent shift in usage:

the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code

But vibe coding is/was not AI assisted code because that implies human programming and reviewing of the partially generated code. The guy who coined the term was explicit, you don't code and you should accept whatever the LLM generates without code review. Hit a problem? Copy/paste the error and hit enter. Don't check and especially don't worry about the code, it's only a weekend project, it's not as though you're actually going to commercialize it...

Commercializing Vibe Coding

Alas! Some bright sparks decided to commercialize it. Vibe coding and vibe coders took on a more derogatory connotation when people out to make a quick buck began pushing this approach to software development on those who don't know what they're doing. Going door to proverbial door spreading the Good Word: Now YOU can build apps without skilled programmers: no code, regulatory or security knowledge required. Prompt & go.

And the new crypto-bros came. In droves.

Those running these platforms generally dismiss or ignore metacognitive blindness as an issue and simply write terms of service agreements that you're responsible, not them, for the poor code, security & regulatory issues, etc. However, the assumption by non-programmers appears to be that the vibe code platforms or the LLMs ought to know what they don't and will of course do it all for them. Afterall, it would be reckless to sell such a service otherwise.

These platforms fuel the AI-bro bandwagon by reinforcing the false narrative that LLM's are/should be deeply engrained in our economies. They ignore that they have no real benefit to the general population, but hey, it certainly helps ensure that AI companies become too big to fail. Why else would they be endangering our water supplies and committing trillions in spending and debt with revenue that could never service it?

I digress, the promises these platforms are making, however ridiculous or crazy, aren't what I want to contemplate here. I want to know how we're supposed to refer to non-programmers, incompetent in their role, who are producing AI slop and liability. 

For a short time we called them vibe coders. But now, apparently, that's not quite right. Which is probably a good thing. Vibe coder sounds too cool for someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

So, what shall we call vibe coders now?

I quite like the term knobstacle because their shitty code gets in the way but it implies ill-intent and as frustrating as the Dunning-Kruger infected vibe code scene is these days, it's probably wise that I remember Hanlon's razor.

Their community seemingly has a preference for 'prompt engineer' but I can't bring myself to call them that. It's akin to calling a baby a milk producer because they cry until you stick a tit in their mouth, like the pillocks of the manosphere.

A more formal name, and perhaps most appropriately, we could refer to them as Metacognitively Blind Software Generator, but that's too long. I think that leaves us with Slop Coder or Prompt Monkey, which certainly has a nice ring to it.

Prompt Monkey, Prompt!