There's no "I" in vibecoding

Vibecoding's all the rage nowadays with some portions of the internet, and while my views on it overall are varied and change on a per-project basis, one thing that irks me regardless is people claiming to have "vibe"-coded things when in actuality they just asked their LLM of choice to program it up for them. There's no "I" in vibecoding, as in, there's no "I vibecoded an app". There's you on one hand, and then the machine on the other. What you did was not coding or programming, what you did was ask a machine to program something for you.

Yeah, this is incredibly nitpicky and probably doesn't matter that much anyway, but it annoys me to no end. There is a bit of nuance to this though, that being whether or not someone's allowed to say they made an LLM-assisted app vs they coded one. It's extremely subtle but I think it makes a huge difference honestly.

Consider the following: is a project manager or technical director allowed to take credit for a project they oversaw, despite them usually not actually contributing any code to the project in the slightest? The obvious answer in my eyes is yes, they are allowed to take credit for it; they may not have contributed materially to the project, but their involvement was instrumental to the project regardless and it probably would not have ended up in the state it did if they weren't overseeing it and making judgement calls at the macro level. But then, how's that any different from how these so-called vibecoders function? They work in a functionally similar way, just substituting LLM agents for real humans. Not counting the one-shot junkies, most people who "vibecode" apps usually are involved in the decision making process, much like how I imagine a technical director would be [1], they usually have a vision for what they want the final program to look like and they constantly herd their LLMs towards that vision.

I think I wouldn't mind as much if they only used the word "made", or "built" Like, "I made this app with [LLM Agent]", or "Me and [LLM Agent] built this program", despite it being somewhat more wordy to say. That is somewhat more palatable to me, it aligns more with the PM analogy too in my mind. I wouldn't like it if a PM claimed to have "coded" or "programmed" an app either, back before LLMs, that would annoy me just as much as the vibecoders. But a PM claiming to have made a product is acceptable to me, as stated above.

Anyway, that's my little rant. Please stop trying to take credit for programming work when the role you filled was that of an overseer, or a manager, they're really not the same thing in the slightest.