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Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) interviewed Yegge [1] and Kent Beck [2], both experienced engineers before vibe coding, and they express similar sentiments about how LLMs reinvigorated their enjoyment of programming. This introduction to Gas Town is very clear on its intended audience with plenty of warnings against overly eager adoption. I agree that using tools like this haphazardly could lead to disaster, but I would not dismiss the possibility that they could be used productively.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZE33qMYwsc

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSXaxOdVtAQ





Anecdote, but some of the time when I am blasted after a day of thinking for my job all day a design session randomly throwing shit at an LLM hits the spot. I usually make some meaningful progress on a pet project. I rarely let the LLM do much pure vibe coding. I iterate with several LLMs until it looks and feels right and then hack on it myself or let the LLM do drudgery like refactoring or boilerplate to get me over the humps. In that sense I do strongly agree.

Beck was in Melbourne a few weeks ago, and his take on LLM usage was so far divorced from what Yegge is doing that their views on what LLMs are capable of in early 2026 are irreconcilable.

What does Beck think?

He was the keynote at YOW! so I can't capture all the nuance and hope I'm not doing him a disservice with my interpretation, but the tl;dr is he:

"LLMs drastically decrease the cost of experimenting during the very earliest phases of a project, like when you're trying to figure out if the thing is even worth building or a specific approach might yield improvements, but loses efficacy once you're past those stages. You can keep using LLMs sustainably with a very tight loop of telling it to do the thing the cleaning up the results immediately, via human judgement."

I.e, I don't think he can relate at all to the experience of letting them run wild and getting a good result.




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