Maybe it was a mistake to try and use natural language for this kind of job, it's too fuzzy and interpretable. Maybe we need a new language, one with a much stricter syntax and no room for interpretation. If you make it simple enough, and use some natural language for important keywords, shouldn't be too difficult to learn.

We could call it "language for programming" or something like that.

Eh, who am I kidding, that'll never catch on.

I think there's some difference in 3d printing. If you find a premade model online with written settings, then print it saying you made it, taking credit for the design, that's what vibe coding is more like. It would be more apt to say you printed it. If you create a model via 3d modeling, cad, gdnt, etc, then that's more like programming, and you can say you made it and that be true and honest.

When using other people's code, there actually is a long-established system of attribution and licencing. You still have to do some (occasionally quite complex) problem solving to figure out how to apply their code and your previous expertise to the task.

It would be more like prompting AI with a fully written text to translate into a different language... except that compiling your code generally produces mostly deterministic, predictable results (which, indeed, is part of programming: to predict how your program will behave) which you can test for errors and debug, while the AI translation is nondeterministic by design (because it's supposed to sound human and humans don't speak deterministically either) and if you know enough to check the translation, it would have been much less wasteful to just translate it your damn self instead of burning the planet for a petty convenience.

Those are all false equivalencies. All of those are tools to supplement a job. Using AI to vibe code an app is not a tool, it's wait service, like the comic illustrates.

If you auto generated an entire message, like prompting AI to write you an email, then no, you didn't write a message. If you auto complete words that you intended to write, then you used tools to help write a message that you created.

A hammer is a tool to build something. Vibe coding is like buying an IKEA piece of furniture and claiming you built it. You didn't build anything, you assembled someone else's build. If you had a magic hammer trained on other people's work and you told it to build a chair, then no, you would not have built a chair.

Computer software is again a tool to complete a job. If you do the engineering, design, and build the antenna, then that's like programming, yes you designed an antenna. If you tell the software you want an antenna and it generates plans you didn't design an antenna, you ordered plans for one.

If you ask AI to kill someone, that's like taking a hammer and killing someone. Yes, you used a tool to kill someone.

It's the complete generation of work and the claim that someone did it themselves that is what AI works are at their core. There is a small skill to prompting most effectively, but that's not creating anything. It's at most building an outline for something. Skilled developers can review code and make corrections, but they didn't create anything.