Ask HN: Can vibe coding competitions be challenging and fair?

[amichail]

If so, how?

[willmeyers]

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.

[xdfgh1112]

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.

[karmakaze]

You could have done the whole exercise the week before and merely regenerate/retrace your steps at the live event.

[hchak]

We did something like this at my workplace, but it was vibes to automate common tasks

[ein0p]

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.

[amunozo]

I think the same about education. Assignments must be harder now, it is impossible and undesirable to ban AI assistants.

[afinlayson]

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.

[heresjohnny]

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.

[runjake]

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

[obayesshelton]

Google CodeJam meets Vibe Coding?