Ask HN: Can vibe coding competitions be challenging and fair?
amichail1 day ago
If so, how?
willmeyers1 day ago
Game jams might be interesting, especially 24-hour ones. Someone who uses an LLM to handle some coding tasks can focus on the art and mechanics. I think it would still challenging and fair with vibe coding.
hchak17 hours ago
We did something like this at my workplace, but it was
vibes to automate common tasks
xdfgh11121 day ago
Experienced game designers have a lot of tooling and libraries of previous code they can borrow to make prototypes quickly. AI would level the playing field.
karmakaze1 day ago
You could have done the whole exercise the week before and merely regenerate/retrace your steps at the live event.
afinlayson1 day ago
The Randomness of LLMs make it so 10 people could write the exact same prompts and have wildly different answers.. It's closer to Texas Hold'em than a coding challenge.
heresjohnny1 day ago
Of course. The only thing that’s changed (raised) is the baseline. It’s still hard to come up with a winning idea that’s innovative, creative, and polished. It’s also much easier to go into a rabbit hole you shouldn’t have gone into, which can be quite costly during a competition.
runjake1 day ago
For a good example, check out Pieter Levels’ vibe coding gaming competition from April. There were some really impressive entries. Karpathy was one of the judges.
I think they can be, except of course the problems need to be much harder, and impossible to solve via vibe coding alone. Like it or not, AI assistance is going to stay with us. This is the "new baseline" against which engineers will be judged.
amunozo1 day ago
I think the same about education. Assignments must be harder now, it is impossible and undesirable to ban AI assistants.
amichail1 day ago
Students might complain that their AI assistant was acting unusually dumb just before the assignment deadline.
Game jams might be interesting, especially 24-hour ones. Someone who uses an LLM to handle some coding tasks can focus on the art and mechanics. I think it would still challenging and fair with vibe coding.
We did something like this at my workplace, but it was vibes to automate common tasks
Experienced game designers have a lot of tooling and libraries of previous code they can borrow to make prototypes quickly. AI would level the playing field.
You could have done the whole exercise the week before and merely regenerate/retrace your steps at the live event.
The Randomness of LLMs make it so 10 people could write the exact same prompts and have wildly different answers.. It's closer to Texas Hold'em than a coding challenge.
Of course. The only thing that’s changed (raised) is the baseline. It’s still hard to come up with a winning idea that’s innovative, creative, and polished. It’s also much easier to go into a rabbit hole you shouldn’t have gone into, which can be quite costly during a competition.
For a good example, check out Pieter Levels’ vibe coding gaming competition from April. There were some really impressive entries. Karpathy was one of the judges.
https://x.com/levelsio
I think they can be, except of course the problems need to be much harder, and impossible to solve via vibe coding alone. Like it or not, AI assistance is going to stay with us. This is the "new baseline" against which engineers will be judged.
I think the same about education. Assignments must be harder now, it is impossible and undesirable to ban AI assistants.
Students might complain that their AI assistant was acting unusually dumb just before the assignment deadline.