this sort of assigning-guilt-by-association use of the vibecoding tag to scarlet-letter any submission that is tangentially related to something that is related to LLMs
I’ll agree that we disagree on that…
The post was praising the work of one of the two largest corporate purveyors of vibecoding in the world. It’s not “assigning guilt by association” to say that it’s about LLM usage; it’s a straightforward description of what the post was about. Employees of an LLM company used LLMs to find the seeds and claim the bounty, then donated it to LetsEncrypt. That is about LLM usage no matter which direction I squint at it from. That is not a tangential relation; it’s the core of the post.
There have been cases where I’ve thought the tag was very much misapplied, but this is not one of them.
OK, I won’t protract the argument beyond this message. But, indeed, we disagree.
Valsorda’s post is discussing the global meaning and consequences of a general result in software engineering that happens to be attained, among other things, by use of LLM assistance, written by a person entirely unrelated to the use of said LLM assistance. Saying that the post itself is thus “about LLM usage” is literally guilt by association.
If you posit that the vibecoding tag is ought to be used in the transitively-tainting, fruit-of-poisoned-tree meaning, then that is exactly what I disagree with.
Valsorda’s post is discussing the global meaning and consequences of a general result in software engineering that happens to be attained, among other things, by use of LLM assistance
if Valsorda wasn’t glazing the LLM company, to the point of calling the authors “the Anthropic team” and saying he planned to send them t-shirts. That’s not a happenstance mention. It’s 5 mentions in a brief (thousand-ish word?) post.
Discussing the significance of the work doesn’t require repeatedly praising its sponsor instead of the researchers, and for me that’s the difference that tips the post toward being about LLM usage. A post about the result wouldn’t emphasize the sponsor like this.
I don’t see how referring to a team of people who work at a place by their employer is glazing. If this work had been done by a team of researchers from Sun Microsystems 30 years ago, we would have an article referring to them as the “Sun Microsystems team.” As for the t-shirt bit, the community set up this challenge to find the seeds, so t-shirts aren’t out of the question there either.
I’ll agree that we disagree on that…
The post was praising the work of one of the two largest corporate purveyors of vibecoding in the world. It’s not “assigning guilt by association” to say that it’s about LLM usage; it’s a straightforward description of what the post was about. Employees of an LLM company used LLMs to find the seeds and claim the bounty, then donated it to LetsEncrypt. That is about LLM usage no matter which direction I squint at it from. That is not a tangential relation; it’s the core of the post.
There have been cases where I’ve thought the tag was very much misapplied, but this is not one of them.
score 7 · canonical
OK, I won’t protract the argument beyond this message. But, indeed, we disagree.
Valsorda’s post is discussing the global meaning and consequences of a general result in software engineering that happens to be attained, among other things, by use of LLM assistance, written by a person entirely unrelated to the use of said LLM assistance. Saying that the post itself is thus “about LLM usage” is literally guilt by association.
If you posit that the
vibecodingtag is ought to be used in the transitively-tainting, fruit-of-poisoned-tree meaning, then that is exactly what I disagree with.score 3 · canonical
I’ll stop too. I’d agree with your comment that
if Valsorda wasn’t glazing the LLM company, to the point of calling the authors “the Anthropic team” and saying he planned to send them t-shirts. That’s not a happenstance mention. It’s 5 mentions in a brief (thousand-ish word?) post.
Discussing the significance of the work doesn’t require repeatedly praising its sponsor instead of the researchers, and for me that’s the difference that tips the post toward being about LLM usage. A post about the result wouldn’t emphasize the sponsor like this.
score 4 · canonical
I don’t see how referring to a team of people who work at a place by their employer is glazing. If this work had been done by a team of researchers from Sun Microsystems 30 years ago, we would have an article referring to them as the “Sun Microsystems team.” As for the t-shirt bit, the community set up this challenge to find the seeds, so t-shirts aren’t out of the question there either.
score 3 · canonical