I have a friend who recently spent some time in a very interesting coding-school. He’s a very radical type, he likes his linux raw, code clean and he passionately hates vibe-coders.
My understanding is though, that the said ugly-thingy is one of the main helplines anyone had in that school. He himself had to turn into the vibe-coder time to time. But that’s not the whole story really, is it - to get the code out of the machine? The option today might be used very differently. First and foremost - for learning. And the turning point from the vibe-coder to interactive learner is here - in the very beginning! One might decide that project is now done as the whole asked code is copied and pushed to production - or one might play with it, test it, maybe ask questions and try to do something on their own with it too.
In this world, like in any other, it is normal to look at others work and pick up the bits and pieces that happen to inspire, then combine them into your own version.
So yes, I understand the code-snatching thing. There has to be a learning process for everything - coding too. And one has to believe, copy and imitate at first. To get the taste, to go through the process, to get first steps done. To get an understanding, to get a little confidence through this sort of play.
Vibe-coder is a new word, I think, that came along in recent times with accessible LLMs. But it is not anything new, really. Code pieces lie all over the internet and have been lying there all the time. It’s just much easier now - you don’t have to hunt the pieces one by one yourself, but you can just write a prompt to get all of them at once.
When one doesn’t evolve, dig deeper and try to understand what it is exactly one coded, why it worked or didn’t, the thing won’t live. At least not for long. The lovely mitten too gets worn and needs to be repaired. If one does not really understand how it is bound together, one can not help it.
In crafty hands, a poorly knitted merino sweater can be unraveled - the yarn retains its structure, ready to be wound back into a skein. But you cannot “un-knit” the thermodynamic cost of a throwaway script. The electricity used to generate thousands of lines of unmaintained code doesn’t stay trapped in the software. It transforms immediately into low-grade heat scattered into the atmosphere. The energy hasn’t disappeared - Newton and Clausius made sure of that - but its capacity to build anything useful is entirely spent.