If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C?
Stephen Ramsay
Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?
Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds.
First, I don’t particularly like vibe coding. I love programming, and I have loved it since I made my first tentative steps with it sometime back in the mid-to-late 90s. I love programming so much, it always feels like I’m having too much fun for it to count as real work. I’ve done it professionally, but I also do it as a hobby. Someone apparently once said, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” That’s how I feel about writing code. I’ve also been teaching the subject for twenty-five years, and I can honestly say I am as excited about the first day of the semester now as I was when I first started. I realize it’s a bit precious to say so, but I’ll say it anyway: Turning non-programmers into programmers is my life’s work. It is the thing of which I am most proud as a college professor.
Vibe coding makes me feel dirty in ways that I struggle to articulate precisely. It’s not just that it feels like “cheating” (though it does). I also think it takes a lot of the fun out of the whole thing. I sometimes tell people (like the aforementioned students) that programming is like doing the best crossword puzzle in the world, except that when you solve it, it actually dances and sings. Vibe coding robs me of that moment, because I don’t feel like I really did it at all. And even though to be a programmer is to live with a more-or-less permanent set of aporias (you don’t really understand what the compiler is doing, really—and even if you do, you probably don’t really understand how the virtual memory subsystem works, really), it’s satisfying to understand every inch of my code and frustrating—all the way to the borderlands of active anxiety—not quite understanding what Claude just wrote.
But this leads me to my second point, which I must make as clearly and forcefully as I can. Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that. Because when you start giving it little programming problems that you can’t be arsed to work out yourself (as I did), you discover (as I did) that it’s awfully good at those. And then one day you muse out loud (as I did) to an AI model something like, “I have an idea for a program…” And you are astounded. If you aren’t astounded, you either haven’t actually done it or you are at some stage of grief prior to acceptance. Perfect? Hardly. But then neither are human coders. The future? I think the questions answers itself.
But to get to my impertinent question…
Early on in my love affair with programming, I read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which I now consider one of the great pedagogical masterpieces of the twentieth century. I learned a great deal about programming from that book, but among the most memorable lessons was one that appears in the second paragraph of the original preface. There, Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman make a point that hits with the force of the obvious, and yet is very often forgotten:
[W]e want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
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