Vibe coding and quality

When you hear that some app was “vibe coded”, how much quality do you expect?

As recently as last year, vibe coding seemed like nothing more than a toy to me. Sure, it was cool that you could tell a computer to build something and it would sort of build it. But the result would be held together with duct tape and only good enough as a prototype. To make something high-quality and reliable, you need to keep the entire codebase under control. You can use AI to write it, but you need to understand what abstractions are being used, how things are connected, how different events are handled, how storage is arranged, and so on.

But now I am developing a Mac app, and I am coming to the opposite conclusion. I started making the app because none of the existing alternatives written by actual Mac programmers satisfied me: the quality was too low. Surprisingly, even the app that Codex wrote for me on the first day (after a week of leisurely conversations to produce the initial spec) already works faster and nicer than all the alternatives. And I can see plenty of directions for improvement.

Now it seems to me that the level of quality I look for is simply unattainable through conventional programming. If I could program something like this myself, I would not have the patience to polish every last detail. If I had an experienced Mac programmer next to me, they would have even less patience for my complaints about imperfections that are visible only when reviewing a screencast frame by frame.

In my experience, most programmers simply do not notice many such details, or do not consider them important. But even if I happened to find someone who did notice and care, I would hesitate to ask them to try rewriting the whole thing in a completely different way just to see whether it might feel a tiny bit better — they are a real human, after all! And the rare programmers with equally high standards of quality are unlikely to be sitting around waiting for me to direct them. They have plenty of ideas of their own.

So now I think that high quality is achievable only through vibe coding.