Vibe Coding Prompts That Should Be Illegal
It’s January. It’s very cold. I don’t want to be at work. I’m staring at my screen trying to generate my way out of this ticket with a divine prompt.
This is something which I’m leaning into. If we are all using AI coding assistants we might as well have some fun as we are wasting tokens (and the earth’s finite natural resources).
Welcome to my latest coping mechanism. My favorite joke vibe prompts.
They might not be productive. They might not be your taste of comedy. But they’re the only thing stopping me from quitting tech and starting work as a carpenter.
Tone and Personality
The tone and personality of your LLM is vital. If you’re in ask mode you’ll want to be dealt with in an appropriate way.
Prompt: “Solve this bug with the smug confidence of someone answering Stack Overflow Questions”
I’m sure you know what I mean. Now you can be That Guy too. Except employed.
Hide your LLM usage
You might be in an environment where usage of AI is frowned upon. So you want the resultant code to look like it was hand-crafted.
Prompt: “Generate code with the elegance of a cat walking across a keyboard.”
Consulting style
Again I know that you’ll relate to this. So here we go.
Prompt: “Refactor this into a monstrosity that somehow passes all tests but cannot be understood by human minds”
We call this “consulting style”.
Maintanence
Your AI might be spewing out code that you don’t really understand. You might not be able to easily follow what is going on in this part of the codebase.
Prompt: “ “Make it fast, make it work, pretend it’s maintainable.”
As long as people think it’s maintainable it will be accepted into the codebase. You’ll be ready to go and it will be rubber-stamped by the Pull Request police.
Self-care
It’s 2 AM. We really want to get this to work, we really want this to (please just work) work and then go to sleep.
Prompt: “Write a function that solves my emotional issues. Or just print logs the issue, whichever is easier”
Self-care is writing pseudocode for your therapist. It doesn’t run, but neither do I before 11 AM.
Do my job for me
You have been at it four hours. Typing prompts here and there, getting the LLM to get things done at speed. The problem is that you haven’t understood the work you have to complete, partly because you haven’t read the ticket.
Prompt: [Copy and Paste ticket description]
Follow-on prompts will include asking the LLM what you should do, if you have read the ticket.
Because let’s be honest, nobody’s read the full ticket since 2017. You just hope Jira hasn’t eaten the acceptance criteria again as you feed that into the machine and wait for your production code to be spat out.
Testing
A common usage of AI (well, LLMs) is testing. Because nobody really enjoys writing tests, do they? Well, I kind of do but that notwithstanding here is a prompt that will probably help you out.
Prompt: “Write a test suite so comprehensive it distracts from the fact that the function always returns true”
Sometimes you have to code defensively. Sometimes you have to code like your promotion depends on good documentation coverage. Sometimes you need to write tests, and it doesn’t really matter if your code is any good or not.
Show the Show
Life is a game, it ends when it ends. When you’re at work you need to make it seem like you’re a competent developer who enjoys complexity, Big “Oh” notation and “doing things the right way”. The way to do this is to levergae AI and get it done!
Prompt: “Write a simple for-loop in a way that would get you arrested in at least two countries.”
It’s verging on interview prep at this point, and might even represent performance art. Nice, right?
Finish with a flurry
You might well love this one. It’s at the end of the article and everything.
Prompt: “Generate a feature with a TODO explaining why I’m not finishing it before lunch.”
Your invisible (incoherent) quiet quitting prompt will solve this in a way that no email to your manager will deliver.
Conclusion
Here are some prompts to help you out. But they’re not, are they?
Yet you’re doing something similar every day, aren’t you. Admit it, please just admit it.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer is more than an LLM prompt. Because they make more mistakes than a machine ever can.