Article URL: https://alexklos.ca/blog/how-do-we-stop-vibe-coding Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033388 Points: 18 # Comments: 15

When Claude Code blew up in popularity near the end of December 2025, a large portion of software developers quickly shifted to using coding agents as part of their main development workflows. Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term "vibe coding," stated on the No Priors podcast in March 2026: I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December, basically, which is an extremely large change. I don't think a normal person actually realizes that this happened or how dramatic it was. I believe him. A lot of people say this is just marketing or hype, but as someone who also hasn't written a single line of code since last year, I think he's being honest here. Now, whether that's good or bad depends on your perspective, but there's no doubt that we've entered a new era of software engineering. Despite the quick adoption of agents, there's a general anxiety growing among the practitioners, and the people watching their output: will the tidal wave of slop ever end? Are we destroying ourselves for the sake of convenience here? How do we stop this? Grady Booch, co-creator of UML, actually argues that we're in the third golden age of software engineering: Booch is careful to note that this third age wasn't started by AI, just accelerated by it. But he also compares AI coding agents to the arrival of compilers in Grace Hopper's time, and that's the comparison that matters here. Compilers abstracted away the machine. Agents abstract away the code itself. We can now, for the first time ever, generate code directly from intent. The lack of this ability was what killed model-driven development back in the day (think what you will about UML, but maybe it's time we thought about bringing MDD back in some form.)