Vibe code is legacy code | Val Town Blog
August 8, 2025
Despite widespread confusion, Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” as a kind of AI-assisted coding where you “forget that the code even exists.”Legacy codeWe already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code.Legacy code is universally despised, and for good reason. But why? You have the code, right? Can’t you figure it out from there?Wrong. Code that nobody understands is tech debt. It takes a lot of time to understand unfamiliar code enough to debug it, let alone introduce new features without also introducing bugs.
As we’ve observed before here at Conffab, and as folks like Jeremy Howard have observed, a lot of software has always been written by non-professional developers. It’s been spreadsheets, Visual Basic, and Microsoft Access. But that doesn’t make this software any less useful or any less important in many respects.
Software like this is not battle-hardened, it’s not security-tested, but it serves a purpose within an organisation. And vibe coding or using code generation without really understanding or caring about the output is something that will I think replace this kind of software development.
Of course, as observed here, if we’re developing production software and yoloing it when it comes to the code, we’re going to have security issues, performance issues, and all kinds of technical debt building up. So vibe code away for your disposable stuff like I do all the time, but when it comes to the durable stuff, as Charity Majors puts it, I think we better pay closer attention to the code that we generate, whether with the support of LLMs or in the good old fashioned two-finger pecking out on the keyboard way.
