r/audioengineering • u/bokkal1 • Sep 03 '26
Discussion Are you afraid of trying new plugins because of vibe coding?
I've been watching new plugins for years, and it's been a pleasure for me to try new ones. But nowadays, everybody makes a new plugin every day, vibe coding with some LLM or whatever.
I'm surprised that they can even ask for money for something we can also make by just kindly asking another LLM (they say prompting). But it's okay for people to try new things and make their dreams come true with those tools.
What makes me anxious is that I also stopped trying new plugins from even bigger brands, because I don't know about the code behind the plugin. So I just stick to the plugins that I've been using for years, and when I try new ones, they're always from the brands that I already kind of trust.
I'm pretty sure there are other people like me, and I genuinely think that this is going to hurt the industry in the long term.
Just wanted to share my ideas and hear about yours.
Cheers.
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u/theantnest Professional Sep 03 '26
The reality is, 99% of any new software has been touched by Claude. Especially the big developers.
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u/stanley_bobanley Professional Sep 03 '26
I work in software and this is true. The most consummate engineers I know, people coding in vim who understand programming fundamentals better than most, are using AI in their daily lives now.
I’m drawing the line at AI generated art, copy, and music. But if you think any engineer is doing the mundane stuff by hand, I think that ship has sailed and it’s likely never coming back.
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u/PsychicChime Sep 03 '26
I think the difference is those seasoned engineers are using AI in a fully assistive capacity and actually understand what's going on well enough that they can fix or edit things as necessary. They know how it works and could code it by hand, but the AI saves them time of having to actually type out all the code. I'm not an ardent supporter of AI, but if that's the new reality we're in, I can at least take comfort in the fact that those specific developers can still take the reigns when necessary.
A huge chunk of the new crop of AI-bro "developers" have no idea how to code at all. They prompt something into existence and if it breaks, they'll need to prompt to get it fixed, but there's no ability to actually examine what's going on under the hood. And they don't care. They just want to rush to profit off of their new widget.7
u/BreastInspectorNbr69 Sep 03 '26
As a 20-year SWE its a fantastic thought partner even if you're not using it to write code. Need an algorithm for something? The LLM probably has at least a basic implementation stored in its latent space, and it can dive extremely deep into the specifics if you want to go there.
That being said I am all for using it to write the code itself. As long as there is a human in the loop and it is following best practices, the code the latest frontier models write is indistinguishable from the code I write, sometimes better
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u/PsychicChime Sep 03 '26
its a fantastic thought partner
You're the master of your own future so if it works for you, go for it. My unsolicited 2 cents: there may be something to be said for struggling on your own for the answer. Sometimes you gain more through the journey than the answer itself and your future self will be better off for it. Even if you arrive at that point through scrolling through forums or talking with other people, having to work for the info tends to cement concepts more concretely than having something spoon feed you everything you want to know as soon as you wonder about it.
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u/BreastInspectorNbr69 Sep 03 '26
Dude I have been struggling on my own for answers for my whole life. Am 100% self-taught in the art of code. And I'm sick of that struggle! I have way more ideas than I have free time or energy to iterate on them, so having something that assists with that is a godsend.
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u/Tindyflow 17d ago
Thanks. I experienced that quite a lot in the past weeks.
Just reading 10-15 years old posts of people who struggled and taking notes from their stuff inspired me to figure out my own stuff.It's a rudimentary result, but I feel like I've learned something about myself.
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26
That's good advice for a junior programmer, but not so much for a very experienced programmer who has been doing it for a long time. The goal for them may be just to build the product and not to pickup a new skill.
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u/CloudSlydr Sep 03 '26
the real issue will be when the actual coders are done and replaced by all AI users that couldnt' fully code on their own. which will probably be the case in 1-2 years. things will get different if it continues on this course...
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u/PsychicChime Sep 03 '26
I wonder how much knowledge is going to be lost due to that happening across industries. It seems there's already a generation of musicians who are growing up relying heavily on AI tools to do stuff that's easily accomplished via low-tech means.
I imagine a distant future version of Ancient Aliens where crackpots allege that there's no way humans could orchestrate a piece of music for all the musicians in a full orchestra without the use of technology, so therefore the existence of pre-AI symphonies is proof of alien visitation. That is assuming we even last that long, of course.3
u/Capt-Crap1corn Sep 03 '26
That would be great for these artificial intelligence companies. That would require people to rely on them more. Drain the actual human resources, and when they retire or get out, you'll be completely dependent on these companies.
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u/PsychicChime Sep 03 '26
That's what I keep warning people about. Right now AI seems like a cheaper option to companies over hiring humans but they're forgetting how tech bros always operate. They run the company at a loss for as long as they can while they capture the market and force out competitors. Once they're pretty much the only option (or darn near close to it), they jack prices and start taking away amenities that used to be included with the base price. Even the services that are charging a fee right now are not coming anywhere near covering their costs, let alone making a profit. The squeeze is coming and it's not going to be pretty.
Everyone who is offloading all their cognitive facilities to AI (or firing their workforce and hiring prompters instead) are about to learn some very hard lessons when they are suddenly forced to pay exorbitant fees to keep using the tech they are now wholeheartedly reliant on.
My not-so-crazy conspiracy theory is that's why search engines are getting worse and libraries are getting defunded. If AI becomes the sole source of any and all information, then people will have to pay fees to get any information. The companies are scraping all the data we put out into the world for free and plan to sell it back to us at a premium.0
u/sirCota Professional Sep 04 '26
engineers have been correcting the slack of poor musicianship since the dawn of modern recording. when i track strings or horn sections … i setup 4-8 chairs or mics as if 4-8 people would be playing like a small ensemble and then i just have my one string guru or horn player sit in first chair play that part, which i edit, then they move to 2nd chair .. or change from trumpet to trombone and they play that part and they cycle thru the ‘orchestra’ so it sounds like a full group of people were there, but nope, just some studio magic. i mean, isnt autotune AI for pitch?
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u/PsychicChime Sep 04 '26
You’re missing the point. It’s not about correcting or not correcting things. The point is that you know your craft and are able to come up with solutions without having to have AI tell you what to do. You know your tools and can think your way through the problem.
No, auto tune isn’t AI for pitch.0
u/sirCota Professional Sep 04 '26
auto tune makes people
who cant do and dont know how to do… do the thing.. itd s basic narrow similar end result. If i didnt know my craft and come up w solutions and couldnt think my way thru a problem .. Autotune will do what it told me it can do on the package. its not an LLM, but the end result to the music and the ones making it is the same. its AI lite basically. people hated it, then they loved it… now they hate it again. same shit0
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u/vwestlife Sep 03 '26
We saw that in the leadup to Y2k. All the old COBOL programmers had retired, and no young ones were learning it anymore, yet big companies were still running 30+ year old code. Many of them had to be called in from retirement to fix it.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
And yet, the world hasn't ended over 2 decades later. Someone we managed just fine without those old COBOL programmers.
And for the next apocalypse, we don't have to call them in, or resurrect them from their graves, because AI can write and fix COBOL, too. I let it do some Commodore 64 sound programming a few days ago. Don't ask why. A fun side quest in my current project.
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 04 '26
we managed just fine without those old COBOL programmers.
COBOL is still being used and maintained. I know someone who makes a living only by maintaining COBOL code. Makes an absolute killing.
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u/vwestlife Sep 04 '26
Please, for the love of God, don't let AI vibe-coding slop seep into COBOL, or else we'll all be doomed.
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u/Hazy24 Sep 03 '26
Using llm's to do the mundane stuff != vibe coding
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u/the_good_time_mouse Sep 03 '26
It's all mundane when you've been doing this for 25 years.
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u/turntupytgirl Sep 03 '26
ok but some people do literally just produce code that they have no idea what it does
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u/stanley_bobanley Professional Sep 03 '26
In fairness this was already the case with libraries and package managers like npm. Especially in the last 15 years software development has been racing toward the current AI assisted workflow.
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u/BreastInspectorNbr69 Sep 03 '26
before it was LLMs its was stack overflow and expertsexchange (lol)
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Sep 03 '26
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Sep 03 '26
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26
No. The software industry hasn't widely used agentic AI for coding until like December 2025, because it sucked before then. Most advancements where it started becoming quite good didn't happen until this year.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26
No, you haven't, and software engineers aren't using ChatGPT to code. They are using OpenAI's agentic coding product Codex and Anthropic's Claude, which didn't start getting really good until December 2025.
And I promise you no companies are winding down their AI use right now. They may be putting more constraints on it to keep costs in check, but that's a totally normal and reasonable thing to do when running a business. You don't want runaway costs for any tools you are using. None of them are just stopping using AI though.
Also, something you don't seem to understand is that producing code faster doesn't solve all of the other cultural and hierarchical problems at companies. You still have to review the code, you still need a QA process, you still have to have product people decide what actually should be built, you still have to form relationships with clients and sell things. AI can help programmers build things more quickly, but it doesn't just magically solve all of the dysfunction that exists in most companies.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
lol. It's wild how much some of you clowns think you know, when you are so, so wrong about so many things. Are you even a software engineer or are you just acting like you are one? I am one and have been one for the last 15 years, and I use Codex and Claude both every single day, just like the majority of my peers.
You sound more like a guy who saw a few news article headlines about AI, but not someone who actually works in tech as a software engineer. You think you understand something you clearly don't. It's just a fact that the majority of the industry has been heavily using AI since about March of this year, and many programmers had already been using it daily since like November or December of last year. Now, almost every company in the industry is using agentic coding in some capacity. This is just the reality.
And, of course, there are caveats. I never once said there aren't. I never once proclaimed my love for AI or claimed that it's perfect. It's not perfect. It gets things wrong all the time. But that's irrelevant. We're still all using these tools every day. They still allow us to do many things much faster than we could have previously. It's literally an extreme competitive disadvantage to not use them now, and that's why nearly every company that produces software IS using them. Programmers who resist using these tools or refuse to adapt and learn how to get the best out of them are getting fired for not recognizing which way the wind is blowing and keeping up.
It's completely true that there is a bubble and the companies are being heavily propped up by investors and Anthropic and OpenAI are heavily subsidized, but none of that means what you think it means. The industry is 100% forever changed. There is no future in which AI goes away. The last 6 months have been the biggest change the tech industry has seen in the last 2 decades in terms of how people actually work day to day. Again, this is just a fact.
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u/dkkc19 Mixing Sep 03 '26
yeah but using AI != it was vibe coded. who cares if claude was used by a developer who knows what they are doing
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u/theantnest Professional Sep 03 '26
But OP is saying they don't want to use new software from "bigger brands" because "LLM"s were used.
The fact is, you're not going to find anything that an AI didn't touch in 2026.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
No, OP said "vibe coded". Not the same thing.
But I suspect OP doesn't know the difference. And do you?
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u/elevatedinagery1 Sep 03 '26
Vibe coding? "=!" ???
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
Not all AI-assisted coding is vibe coding.
Where exactly you draw the line is up for debate, but using an LLM to implement and test something you have designed and specified is nowhere close to single prompt vibe coding.
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 03 '26
"!=" means "does not equal".
"vibe coding" means "ask the LLM to write the software for you without you understanding what the code does".There's plenty of ways to use AI to accelerate your coding. E.g. instead of having to design a new function to transform one format into the other you can put that into a prompt and have the AI come up with a function which you can then test and implement. This saves a lot of time and you still understand what the code is doing.
You could also use AI to collect a todo-list for the day (e.g. list all the bugs that you need to fix in your software). AI wouldn't even be touching the code, yet AI was still used for the code.
Those are just examples of how AI is being used by practically every engineering company these days.-5
u/vwestlife Sep 03 '26
"!=" means "does not equal".
You're not on an ASCII terminal anymore. I'm pretty sure your favorite AI writing assistant can type up a real ≠ symbol for you.
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 03 '26
Sure, but that‘s not what they asked about.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
It's hilarious how people who clearly don't code are thinking they need to lecture us what tools we can and cannot use for coding, right?
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 03 '26
It's not really about the tools, it's about whether or not you understand what you are creating to a sufficient degree.
I know how to create functions or write a script for format conversion of measurement data, it's just faster to let someone else do it. Previously I would have my intern(s) do it, now it's the AI doing it for me.
(Which is it's own issue, because it also means that I have fewer interns that I can train to be full engineers in the future...)→ More replies (0)1
u/elevatedinagery1 Sep 03 '26
It's funny this was my first common sense thought as well: can't these genius coders use an equal sign with a line through it?! Lol
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 04 '26
Exclamation mark and equal sign are available on a regular keyboard, the ≠-sign is not.
Are you really that young to never have seen “!=“ being used before?
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u/dkkc19 Mixing Sep 03 '26
The fact is, you're not going to find anything that an AI didn't touch in 2026.
i would say this applies to like anything since 2023 at least no?
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u/GaboureySidibe Sep 03 '26
That's not the same as vibe coding.
Vibe coding is when you never look at the source and don't know how anything works.
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u/Low-Mind798 Sep 03 '26
I don't know, man. I've got a few FabFilter plugins, a few UAD plugins, the SoundToys bundle, and that's pretty much all I’ve used for the past 10 years. I never really felt like I was missing anything. That's maybe $1k worth of plugins, and that's basically all I've ever invested in plugins. I don't really have the urge to keep buying new stuff when what I already have works perfectly fine. The last thing I bought was Apulsoft SplitS because it's easier and faster than using the Melodyne method when I need to control sibilance. And honestly, I find it hard to believe that a UAD 1176 emulation is ever going to be "replaced" by something else, no matter how well it's coded or modeled. At some point, if the plugin already sounds great and you know how to use it, I don't really see the point in replacing it just because something newer came out.
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
Completely agree.
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u/Low-Mind798 Sep 03 '26
Don't get me wrong. I like it when new stuff is actually meaningful and different from what we already have. But I feel like 99% of the market is already covered, and there are very few genuinely innovative plugins in past 5 years. Like I said, SplitS is a relatively new plugin, and I fell in love with it the moment I saw how simple it was and how well it worked. I've always hated the way traditional de-essers work and how they can make the vocal sound muffled. With this little plugin, I can basically just turn down the volume of all the sibilance across a track in seconds and still keep it clean. And that's what made me start using it instead of any sort of De-Esser.
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u/greyaggressor Sep 03 '26
I’ve got exactly the same plugins and haven’t tried anything new in years.
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u/Low-Mind798 Sep 03 '26
Apulsoft kinda made me buy new stuff after i saw Opalize and SplitS i was amazed. But other then that i don't rly need another "EQ THAT WILL MAKE YOUR MIX SOUND PERFECT" nah i will stick to my EQP1 and Pro Q.
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u/jamiethemorris Sep 04 '26
How are you using opalize? I assume in the same way you might typically use subtle saturation? I got splitS a few months ago and I love it, it’s one of my favorite plugins now. But I haven’t really explored their other plugins yet.
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u/Low-Mind798 Sep 04 '26
Opalize is acutaly something i never saw in plug it don't work like normal saturation/distortion it's kinda some black magic type of plugin adding harmonics without distortion/saturation. I don't know other plugs from them as i never used them. Watch Opalize video on Yt from Apulsoft they kinda explained how it works and how its diffrent then regular saturator, english is not my native so i wloud kinda struggle to explain in details.
Opalize video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IKmvoCpCRI
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u/DapperDragon Sep 03 '26
"I was sick of x so I built y" Yeah im not too interested in new plugin slop
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u/FewRefrigerator4703 Sep 03 '26
Yup vibecoders justifying how they found one feature missing and clone the entire stuff to add that one feature and making every other feature worse
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
Is this not a good justification for making your own tool?
What is this recent hate against DIY?
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u/HamburgerDinner Sep 03 '26
Vibe coding is explicitly not DIY.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
I don't think you know what "explicit" means.
But even if you'd drop that word, you'd still be wrong.
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u/HamburgerDinner Sep 03 '26
Is English your first language?
I used the word explicitly to emphasize the meaning of the word not. As in, "vibe coding is clearly, specifically, directly, not DIY, because prompting an LLM to write you code is not doing it yourself when it comes to creating something like a plug-in."
Are you thinking of the rude or sexualized meaning of explicit? I could use it that way too. For example I could say "the venn diagram of people that vibe code plug-ins and people that suck their own dicks is a circle."
To be clear, I wasn't using the word that way, and I would never use it that way when talking to another redditor, because that would be rude and would likely violate the rules of the subreddit.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
Yeah, no, that's not how "explicit" works.
(I didn't read your slop. I read the first sentence, then saw that you were still talking about the word "explicit" in the last paragraph, and decided it's not worth my time)
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 03 '26
That is in fact how „explicitly“ works, yes
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
Yeah. You really don't know what it means.
And you are boring me.
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u/oratory1990 Audio Hardware Sep 03 '26
Regardless of your level of boredom, dictionaries disagree with you
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u/ploptart Sep 03 '26
Typing a prompt into an AI is not doing anything yourself. Just like how ordering something from a restaurant is not DIY either.
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u/whySoAngryBro Sep 03 '26
Yeah, but the restaurant brings you good food; the AI brings you good code...
Whether AI has a firm grasp on Fourier math and signal processing I think is more suspect, but inasmuch as it understands the math, the code will be good.
Right now I only make a few grand a year from my audio/music business (mainly mixing); my main job is software engineering; I use Claude all the time, and he does a superb job. You still have to clean up a few things he'll do in an overly complicated way, or just using the wrong tool compared to what I wanted, but it's a huge time saver and I vibe code all the time.
I guess the issue I take with your analogy is that, yeah, you can't call yourself a chef for ordering a steak, but if the steak is delicious, the goal was still accomplished ("make a steak").
To OP's point - no - I'm not scared of "vibes" ending up in my plugins - they crashed all the time before Claude, they'll continue crashing afterwards*.
*I use Studio One, so crashes are just a part of life anyway
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
You can discuss the math with AI and verify it - with the help of AI. It's math, not history of the Middle East. It's all verifiable.
You can drop AI a vague idea, based on some rudimentary domain knowledge you have, it will give you the vocabulary, so you know what it's called, what to search for, and what to ask about. Then you can do reaearch. Old-school, and with AI. Of course, you'll do best with both. If you think that's "dangerous" or a problem of "trust", then you've likely never properly learned how to learn things...
After a while, you know enough to tell AI what to build and how to build it, and the AI can help you fill the gaps. After some more time of bouncing ideas and feedback off each other. you have a spec and a plan.
Then you have the AI code it, write the tests, document the results. All of that goes into git. A fresh agent can read it, and so can you, and both of you will understand what was built and be able to build on top of it, tweak it, fix it, document it.
I'm so tired of hearing horseshit takes about AI from people who don't use it or have barely scratched the surface with free chat bots (and even those are quite good now, but if you judge them by taking their output at face value, then I have some wifi cable with gold connectors to sell you).
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u/whySoAngryBro Sep 03 '26
I agree with you on all points excepting a minor disagreement on how good AI is at math, I think you still gotta be careful there - but as you say, it can teach you terminology, and it can show you what you don't know in a way that lets you look it up.
Happy to join you in being downvoted - what do we know - just a couple of professional software engineers who use the tool every day... 😂
Classic Reddit.
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u/bot_exe Sep 03 '26
I know exactly what you mean, I’m just finishing up my first contribution to a legit open source project thanks to Claude’s help. It’s honestly baffling to me that people don’t understand how incredible LLMs are for self-learning and DIY. Being a lifelong autodidact, I have been fascinated with books, papers, the internet, wikis, forums, search engines, etc. LLMs are the newest tool to gather and process information and it’s such a joy to use them for learning and building stuff.
I see negative comments about LLMs all the time, and believe me I do know their flaws (been using them since GPT-3.5 which was so bad), but most of these negative comments just strike me as coming from fundamentally uncurious people; that do not care about self-learning anything new, since otherwise they would immediately notice their value.
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u/AceFaith Sep 03 '26
I'm also an autodidact (in parts) and while I don't disagree, I'm curious what goes through your mind that makes LLM use permissible when you have a perfectly good brain to use for learning and building? Any and all good documentation ever worth reading will never need to be summarized by an LLM, and that's especially true in the type of work that audio production involves. To me, the use case for distilling and synthesizing information for audio work is perfected by good human brains. LLMs can do a mediocre job regurgitating from forum posts but it rarely extrapolates from the literature in a meaningful manner (speaking experientially).
How would an LLM meaningfully help in audio production work? If it cannot facilitate that, what other avenues could be explored?
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u/bot_exe Sep 03 '26
I'm curious what goes through your mind that makes LLM use permissible when you have a perfectly good brain to use for learning and building?
this question does not make any sense to me. First, permissible? what does that even mean? It's obviously not illegal or immoral, so sounds like nonsense to ask if it's permissible or not.
Using an LLM does not stop you from using your brain or using other tools and sources, in fact they go together really well. This is like saying using a wiki or a search engine means you won't use your own brain to figure things out or use other sources like papers or books to search for more information. This strange false dilemma that you are claiming does not really exist.
How would an LLM meaningfully help in audio production work?
It's honestly very open ended and vast and goes way beyond audio production. u/EC36339 comment above already gave a high level description of how it helps to learn and build things on your own. You need to experiment and look at people's workflows that have built meaningful stuff with them. I'm not going to write a whole workflow right now, but there's a lot of information out there.
LLMs can do way more than summarizing and inaccurate regurgitation, seems like your experience is either outdated or you are used weak models or the wrong techniques or the LLMs are not good for your particular niche or any combination of that. I definitely ran into a lot of pitfalls, specially with the older models and UIs (GPT 3.5 and early chatGPT). It took some time for them to develop and for me to learn how to use them properly. It has evolved really fast in just the last 4 years. Now they work really well for my coding, image processing, music production, software troubleshooting, research for my thesis, etc.
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u/AceFaith Sep 04 '26
This strange false dilemma that you are claiming does not really exist.
I'm old enough to remember an age before Wikipedia where this claim also flew around with regards to the Internet. Most schools are good about alerting people about the pitfalls of searching or AI - but for most casual users, that will in-fact mean that their research ends at the end of an AI prompt, or a query in a search engine. What I'm saying is: this dilemma has always been around and changes form over time. Parts of it are worth heeding and thinking about.
LLMs can do way more than summarizing and inaccurate regurgitation...
I have given it a few meaningful swings and simply found it slower or less accurate than my current workflows. For instance, after recording sessions alone, I will document the minutiae of the work involved textually so that the sound work can be cataloged, either for later reuse or just archiving. In sessions with others, I just write recording / editing logs and itemized lists of amount of hours worked for billing. My thought was that LLMs could help with iterating on the notes to other meaningful avenues, and that RAGs could facilitate billing over multiple sessions, or as a way of asking what sessions I was poring over a specific time period.
Which isn't to say it couldn't help someone else with those things or others! I just didn't find the results too promising (yet) as of using it in February this year.
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u/ploptart Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
But you didn’t make a steak, you ordered one.
I’m also a software engineer by trade. I use Claude as well. I don’t take credit for work I didn’t do. I now spend most of my day writing prompts and reviewing clanker spew.
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u/whySoAngryBro Sep 03 '26
But you didn’t make a steak, you ordered one.
OK, but I still have a steak.
The topic of the thread is:
Are you afraid of trying new plugins because of vibe coding?
The answer is "no".
It's true that my sentiments don't address your comments about "DIY or not" directly, I'm speaking to the comment you replied to:
Is this not a good justification for making your own tool? What is this recent hate against DIY?
I took your comment on his semantics ("DIY") as an attempt to refute his point by saying that it doesn't apply by virtue of not being "DIY".
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u/ploptart Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
My response was to [u/EC36339](u/EC36339)’s question, “what is this recent hate against DIY”. He wants to play a victim, by claiming people hate DIY.
My answer is, vibe coding is not DIY. We hate vibe coding because it requires no expertise to spew out some slop, and it puts the burden of effort on the user or the code reviewers. And let’s be honest, people sharing vibe coded audio plugins aren’t getting the work reviewed by anyone with expertise in the field.
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u/whySoAngryBro Sep 04 '26
OK.. I feel that you're sort of hijacking the intent behind his comment and turning it into a semantic argument about what "DIY" is instead of addressing the content of his claim / the nature of his query ("what is the issue people take with [AI assisted custom software]?").
My answer is, vibe coding is not DIY.
OK, sure; I think it's still DIY since you still have to edit, QA, and market whatever the AI writes, especially checking the fourier math and using spectrum analyzers etc. to make sure it's actually doing what you think it's doing to your signal.
But I'm not really interested in continuing a semantic argument about what constitues "DIY" or not, so let's agree to disagree there.
And let’s be honest, people sharing vibe coded audio plugins aren’t getting the work reviewed by anyone with expertise in the field.
Citation needed 😉. Curious to hear what plugins you experienced issues with; to be fair, I haven't used any other than the usual suspects - Waves, FabFilter, etc. - which all probably have some vibes at this point.
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u/ploptart Sep 04 '26
I think we read OP’s post differently. They said “everyone makes a new plugin every day, vibe coding with some LLM or whatever”, and later, “I also stopped trying new plugins from even bigger brands”.
The second complaint, that well-established audio plugin companies are using LLMs to write code, is less of a problem in my mind. Like I said, they are more likely to already have a defined SDLC, to have standards and practices and discipline. If they release a shit plugin, people will complain and their reputation will be harmed.
None of that applies to the fly-by-night vibe coders who frequent hobby-related subreddits. It’s much more likely those people have little to no experience writing software, no expertise in DSP, likely aren’t even aware of what a code review is. These people can spend very little time or effort or thought making slop, and the burden is put fully on everyone else to provide feedback. Those aren’t worth anyone’s time, including the person who generated the slop.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
First, I'm no victim. The only victims I see here are all the victims of their preconceived notions and their ignorance by choice. Words don't hurt me, but your lack of curiosity hurts you.
And yes, LLM-assisted coding is DIY. All coding of your own tools is DIY. And LLMs have enabled a lot more people than ever to make their own tools. That's why hating it is gatekeeping and hating DIY.
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u/ploptart Sep 03 '26
What do you think the D in DIY stands for? If I call a plumber to fix my sink, would you agree I repaired it myself, that I’m a DIY plumber? I searched Google for the plumber’s phone number and dialed it myself
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
These takes are so tired. Just stop talking about things you don't know shit about.
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u/ploptart Sep 03 '26
Sorry it hurts your ego to tell you prompting an AI isn’t the same as doing the work yourself. I’ve made my living as software engineer for more than 20 years, and I do know what I’m taking about.
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u/EC36339 Sep 03 '26
You don't, because you've been sleeping for the last 6-12 months of those 20 years, and it's a bad time to fall asleep. Unless you want to quit. In that case, enjoy the rest of your life doing something else.
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u/ploptart Sep 03 '26
Keep telling yourself that writing AI prompts makes you a skilled engineer. Go vibe code some audio plugins and see how many people are impressed
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u/tubesntapes Sep 03 '26
Vibe coding is a good excuse to get your head back into making something worth making, and pay less attention to plugins in general. We’ve had the tools to produce good music for a very long time now. Get to know a few tools and press on. Let other folks take the journey that involves looking for a magic button that makes everything sound perfect. Let them lose their joy in making something worth making. Personally, im not the least bit interested in any of that.
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Sep 03 '26
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u/jamiethemorris Sep 04 '26
I think I like buying plugins more than trying them. I buy new things and then just use the same stuff I’ve been using.
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u/Geoplex Sep 03 '26
It's wild how universal the "what plugins do i need to succeed" trap is and how 18 years into music production i still hear its siren song. Needed a reminder thank you
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u/imahumanbeinggoddamn Performer Sep 03 '26
The dopamine hit of buying new tools is nowhere near the dopamine hit of actually making stuff, but it is way easier and way faster so it tempts people away from the light.
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u/peepeeland Composer Sep 04 '26
I guess everyone is lucky that crack cocaine doesn’t come in plugin form.
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u/jamiethemorris Sep 04 '26
I think suno is the closest thing. You should see the subreddit when they have an outage.
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u/BigmouthforBlowdarts Sep 03 '26
Idk. Fabfilter pro q/Saturn and pro c relieved me of my need for plugins.
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u/krushord Sep 03 '26
Not "afraid" as such, more so that it's getting pretty rare to see anything that would feel like it's something I need. Most of the vibecoded ones are not really offering any new workflow solutions or, well, even solving any problems. They're just alternative takes on exisitng stuff.
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u/alyxonfire Professional Sep 03 '26
I’m mostly weary of new small companies because I work professionally full time and don’t want to end up with any more broken old projects than I already do.
I do avoid vibe coded stuff, mainly because if I wanted a vibe coded plugin then I would vibe code it myself, but I’m not that desperate yet. I can generally get by with an Ableton rack if I need some functionality that a plugin is missing.
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Sep 03 '26
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u/pixelvspixel Sep 03 '26
Thank you, this is just top tier paranoia or karma farming. The silliness of AI fear is far out of control now.
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u/edskellington Sep 04 '26
I tried to vibe code a plugin a few months ago and let me tell you, it was shot and I’m an experienced developer with over 20 years experience.
We’re not there yet… yet
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u/Weekly_Jmr Sep 03 '26
I’m not afraid of anything vibe coded, I just couldn’t be bothered. If I want to vibe code anything I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself. I don’t think it will necessarily hurt the industry tho. Most vibe coded things will handle themselves in relatively short amount of time one way or another. Either the vibe coder will actually figure out what they are doing and will support their thing properly making it an actual useful product (unlikely in most cases) or we will simply never hear about it again because the vibe coder will quickly realise there’s no ‘easy money’ in this and just move on to something else. After all LLMs are not free which puts your average vibe coder in the situation where their product must make money to sustain itself at all times or they’ll simply lose money and time (as opposed to just time) on supporting something they don’t even understand.
The issue with LLMs and vibe coding is that coding itself was never the problem so making it a bit faster and more accessible to people with no prior (commercial) experience doesn’t really solve anything. One still have to deeply understand wtf they’re doing before they’ll be able to make something good with or without LLMs. LLMs are just advanced code completion tools at the end of the day.
Long story short I think tools will pro stick in the form of distilled local models but all the vibe coded slop will fade away rather quickly like it faded away already in other industries.
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u/itssexitime Sep 03 '26
It’s more about some no name suddenly putting out plugins. Will they support them? Can they fix bugs quickly. Why the fuck are they charging $100 or more? It feels scammy and like buying a cheap Chinese synth that cost $15 to make. Shit I’d rather have the Chinese synth.
An established company using ai to test their plugins doesn’t really bother me.
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u/boring-commenter Sep 04 '26
This is also my concern. Will I suddenly lose access to download it? How stable is the company? Will it be supported if there are issues? Will it work with future operating systems?
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u/D4ggerh4nd Sep 03 '26
One likes to imagine that reputable companies test releases rather vigorously prior to release. Besides that, I'm not sure someone could vibe code a complex plugin completely from scratch (yet).
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u/kravesound Sep 03 '26
A buddy of mine has vibe coded a blue cat patchwork style plugin that allows for complex chaining, splitting and routing not unlike ableton’s rack, it’s pretty robust already without having done optimisations.
The technology is more than capable of creating complex plugins right now.
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Sep 03 '26
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u/ill_llama_naughty Sep 03 '26
That’s almost more a matter of taste and design ability than anything else. A year or two ago you needed someone who could clean up the 10-20% the LLM got wrong, but now you can pretty much prompt your way through making some good software… but also I have 10 years of software development experience so this might be a “fish doesn’t know what water is” thing for me lol
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u/D4ggerh4nd Sep 03 '26
That is interesting. Did your mate have any prior knowledge of plugin coding? My impression from your post is that he didn't. Which would be impressive, for sure.
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u/kravesound Sep 04 '26
he had and still has zero knowledge of plugin coding, Claude did everything for that plugin, UI included
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u/Jodythejujitsuguy Sep 03 '26
Anything that says it’s “life changing” or something to that effects I won’t touch.
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26
I'm surprised that they can even ask for money for something we can also make by just kindly asking another LLM (they say prompting).
That's the thing though. You probably can't. If you don't know anything about memory management, math & algorithms commonly used in DSP programming, performance optimization, automated testing, etc., what makes you think you can actually build something to the same level of an experienced programmer who happens to be using AI?
What makes me anxious is that I also stopped trying new plugins from even bigger brands, because I don't know about the code behind the plugin. So I just stick to the plugins that I've been using for years, and when I try new ones, they're always from the brands that I already kind of trust.
lol. Wtf? Why do you care what they use? If they are bigger, established companies with good devs, they will thoroughly test and optimize the plugins regardless of whether AI was used to assist in coding or not. It should make no difference to you one way or another. Practically the entire software industry changed 6 months ago. Almost everyone is using Claude and Codex daily now.
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u/bokkal1 Sep 04 '26
Bigger, established companies don't vibe code. I don't mean using LLMs while coding; I mean vibe coding.
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26
It's pretty clear you didn't know the difference or you wouldn't even say something like "What makes me anxious is that I also stopped trying new plugins from even bigger brands, because I don't know about the code behind the plugin" in the first place.
Be honest with yourself. You've never known "about the code behind the plugin" in the past either. You don't know anything about programming. You're applying vague fearmongering/negativity about AI across a wide spectrum to the point that you are claiming that you are "anxious" about buying new plugins from established companies, which sounds ridiculous. You have no idea what the programmers at these companies are doing now, and you didn't before they used LLMs either. And you shouldn't care at all, because it doesn't mean anything. At the end of the day, the product is either good or it isn't. It either has bugs or it doesn't. It either gets maintained and patched regularly or it doesn't.
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u/Plokhi Sep 03 '26
I’m not a fan of vibecoded slop that overwhelmed the market but if you think you can get something useful by telling chatgpt “make me a plugin”, you’re simply wrong
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u/WhatsTheGoalieDoing Sep 03 '26
No, they aren't.
It's incredibly easy to prompt for it if you know any decent amount about what X compressor or Y limiter does and how it works, and if you're in any way familiar with programming ideas.
Source: I've done it for shits and giggles. Of course I didn't release it let alone try to sell it, but I wanted to test what ChatGPT/Codex vs Claude would come up with, and they both did pretty decent jobs.
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u/flatfive44 Sep 03 '26
There is a sea change underway in the way skilled developers use LLMs for coding. For example, a developer might have a whole team of coding agents that go away for hours or days to get something accomplished. One way of measuring LLM coding strength is to see how long you can let the LLM (or LLMs) code without supervision or intervention. That number is growing pretty fast.
My concern with plugins is: is there enough publicly-available code out there for LLMs to be expert in something like synth programming?
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u/Disastrous-Bag-4957 Sep 03 '26
I couldn’t care less how it was made as long as it does the job, and it sounds good
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u/ChapelHeel66 Sep 03 '26
Most of the vibe coded plugins I have seen are free. Occasionally I will try one, and if it isn’t useful (which has been the case so far), I just delete them, no damage done. Mostly I don’t try them because they are one-knob plugins (which I don’t like no matter how they are coded) or they are just stock effects or utilities that I have gobs of already (like I need another phaser, flanger, compressor, etc.). Pretty easy to screen out that low hanging fruit.
I really don’t care how something is coded if it’s any good. Someone with a novel idea and no ability to code is eventually going to make something great with AI’s help.
And I don’t even mind the people who just want to make their own compressor to see if they can do it. You can learn a lot about coding when working with AI, if you approach it that way. I don’t necessarily understand why someone wants to *release* a personal project like that — I suspect some want to show off and don’t realize we can tell exactly what’s happening. A good plugin is hard to make.
The only times I’ve been irritated with vibe coding are 100% the humans’ fault, where there is no attention to detail. Whereas pre-AI coding had some self-imposed level of QC — you could hardly work your way through a coding and testing process without being detail oriented - the wrong kind of vibe coder is lazy. I’m thinking of a guy who released a one-knob saturator where “heat” was labeled at 5:00, but at 5:00 the effect was bypassed. To get the heat, you had to dial to 7:00 at the cold setting, and you got a digital readout of 0.
But isn’t that just a specific example of use of AI in all areas? Advertising? Crappy spreadsheets? Poorly drafted contracts? It’s really the human producing the garbage, even if they started with AI.
Would I pay for a plugin that on its face look vibe coded? Probably not unless it was from a developer with a good reputation. Before paying, I need some evidence that the developer was not lazy, and reputation (and eventually user reviews) are my screening tool.
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u/DrubNut Sep 03 '26
if they have "try before buy" they're worth it, cause they know their thing it's good. But then again, if it sounds good 🤷♂️
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u/Charwyn Professional Sep 03 '26
I am EXTREMELY wary of new plugins and stuff. Mostly it’s either trustworthy sources, or “legacy” stuff for me.
Honestly I didn’t think of vibe coding as a reason to be sceptical. Mostly smth that could be vibecoded looks like it’s just “it has no freaking use to me lol”
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u/TeemoSux Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
People in audio engineering who want to put out quality work need to be more intentional with what tools they use in my opinion. As few as possible, but choose as high quality and easy workflow ones as possible and know every single parameter of them.
Im generally keeping the amount of tools i use low- i uninstalled every single plugin i didnt use in at least every 3rd mix, uninstalled all multiples that do the same thing, and chose what to uninstall also based on how many different launchers or eco systems or patchers i would need to install.
In total i have around 45 plugins on my mac including everything from EQs to compressors and reverbs (ignoring that UAD installs like 300 by just having uad installed, with uad i only count the ones i use). Most are either fabfilter or some kind of analog emulations, i dont use a lot of "magic specialty plugin that solves a big issue" type things. I demoed and tried tons of them, but those kinds of plugins seem way more prone to weird sidechain bugs or other issues. The ones most like "specialty" plugins from what i use would be soothe3 or the al1 limiter. Id also recommend to prefer bigger companies and ones that have existed for longer, not only because youre gonna get bugfixes and compatability patches more consistently, but if youre doing this professionally and you need to open an old session years down the line, you want everything to still work.
I only add or change out plugins for new ones around once a year when adjusting my template, and by the time my "once a year" template improvement day comes around, most new or hyped plugins are already well tested to the point of the hype wearing down, or showing if the devs care and patch issues and so on, and i also personally test everything i use for how far you can push it before it aliases and similar stuff.
vibe coding will only negatively affect people who already dont care enough what tools they use IMO.
Keep the number of plugins you use as little as possible but be intentional with which you use and know exactly how to get the sound you want with each, then vibe coding wont matter to you
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u/passerbycmc Sep 03 '26
Got my out of box stuff from the daw, and a few fabfilter and sound toys plugins I got many years ago and never felt a need to look for more.
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u/Natedude2002 Sep 03 '26
I use Ableton, and what I’ve learned is that I can get any sound I want with the stock stuff. I have thought about vibe coding a plugin when I’ve wanted something really specific (and you could get super experimental reverbs and delays and stuff), but I don’t see a point in buying someone elses vibe coded plugin, because I could just make my own at that point for free.
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u/Selig_Audio Sep 03 '26
we are not far from the day we all ‘vibe code’ our own plugins in real time, adding controls and parameters and creating exactly what we need by simply typing/speaking the description. Or we’ll simply describe the change we want to hear, and populate a few knobs for fine tuning, like “I need the snare to be brighter and punch through the mix a little better (with knobs for brightness and punch) or similar. It’s coming…IMO, as always!
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u/andreacaccese Professional Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
The reality is almost every developer uses some form of AI, and it doesn’t really bother me as long as its not a completely “black box” plugin. It’s so easy to discern the slop from great stuff. Speaking from my personal experience, I’ve developed a plugin with some coding help from AI, it still took me over 6 months of almost daily work to finish it and probably will take me another 2-3 months before I can call it done. AI helps me fill in the gaps with my limited coding skills and makes the process a little faster but certainly doesn’t replace the plugin design process
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u/Tall_Category_304 Sep 03 '26
I’m really not shooting new plugin companies. Pretty much stick to fabfilter, uad, soundtoys, Valhalla, izotope rx, Melodyne, undertone audio, arturia, voxengo etc.
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u/emojisexcode Sep 03 '26
having dabbled in plugin development pre-AI, programming native audio plugins is pretty tricky. There’s a lot of complicated memory management due to the low latency requirements.
I’ve always been wary of any new plugin I get that I haven’t battle tested and I’ll usually do a “save new version” in reaper when I add one, just in case it crashes my session. Even before AI.
I think there have always been people developing more-or-less useless plugins, but the barrier for entry was so high that there were just less of them. Now the barrier is super low, but tbh I’m also seeing a lot of really interesting stuff popping up amidst the slop.
Maybe the answer to shitty AI music is cool new plugins allowing producers and artists to push their sound into places. but idk I’m always over optimistic about these things.
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u/flatfive44 Sep 03 '26
Personally I'm not too worried about newer, capable coding LLMs being able to handle the intricacies of memory management. There is lots of code and discussion in the wild on memory management. But what about on some esoteric corners of audio engineering?
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u/walker-flocker Sep 03 '26
At this point I have no way of knowing what was vibecoded and what wasn't. Sometimes it can be obvious, other times we have to take their word for it, which doesnt mean anything.
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u/itzelezti Sep 03 '26
I code DSP for a living.
I pretty much just use open source plugins.
All of the big plugin companies code was trash before AI. I'm certainly not touching their crap now.
There's an open source version of all of the important stuff that uses half the resources. Anything special a plugin is doing, you can replicate it quickly from parts if you know what you're doing.
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u/ElNeeko Sep 03 '26
The fact that I am Mister Curiosity and like (or have the uncontrollable urge?) to look into the process of makers and companies (My life is a "how it's made" show) keeps me away from that stuff naturally.
I enjoy the stuff made by serious folks and tend to only trust certain brands.
But if vibe coding means creating utilities rather than complex plugins, I am open to that. To me that's the same as Max4live devices in ableton, or extensions for reaper, etc.
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
Creating utilities is definitely something I might even use myself. I even have software that lives only on my computer. The issue happens when people start asking $10 a month for something like that.
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u/ElNeeko Sep 04 '26
Yep! Or hiding under a fake branding and an over the top sales pitch and false claims. But when you know, you know. I don't think I will fall down such a trap. My supreme cult leaders are the folks at Fabfilter and Eventide. They are the only ones I could follow blindly and go "shut up and take my money".
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u/MARTEX8000 Sep 03 '26
I'm not particularly afraid of new plugins for any reason...
The bigger issue is we're running out of things to emulate...and the next phase is to emulate what artists actually do...but we've kinda had that issue for longer than we recognize.
I've got some outboard gear that I can pretty much assure you no one else in the world has (A 16 track tape machine no one here has heard of, a compressor used in radio no one has seen since 1970's/etc)...and there's no way in hell I'm letting anyone near it...not to code or to emulate.
Some things need to fall through the cracks...its how the light gets in.
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u/GreatScottCreates Professional Sep 03 '26
Yeah I’m not really interested in most of this stuff from solo devs but I trust the big companies to at least have done thorough, institutional testing.
There have been a few things that are vibe coded or appear to be that have been interesting but for the most part, I’m good.
Ironically I’m developing several apps for audio folks. None are plugins.
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u/rightanglerecording Sep 03 '26
The Pro Tools AAX ecosystem mitigates some of this.
I'm sure there's still LLM usage everywhere, but the moderately higher barriers to entry make it more likely that the manufacturers stick around for the longer term, offer support, etc. And I believe there's some QC oversight from Avid for AAX developers.
I also only buy new plugins when they start showing up on sessions I receive. Other than that, I have more than enough tools.
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u/randomawesome Sep 03 '26
I've been a full-time professional for 17 years now. Session stability and recall-ability are 2 of my top priorities. Theres literally no plugin around worth compromising that need at my studio.
No subscriptions for me, no vibe-coded slop either.
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u/afecalmatter Sep 03 '26
Yes beware of Instagram ads for plugins. I tried one and it is a godawful buggy mess
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u/RelativeBuilding3480 Sep 03 '26
Forgive my ignorance but what is,vibe coding? And what is LLM? TIA
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u/LevelMiddle Sep 04 '26
My stance is that we have an inordinate amount of plugins that do the same thing. With all the plugins that came out pre-2020 or whatnot, we're basically set for life to do anything and everything.
If AI can help developers create things we never otherwise would have been able to come up with, i'm all for it. It's not that i'm a pessimist or something in regards to human potential... it's just that it might take a couple lifetimes or longer for there to be significant creative change enough for plugin developers to make something truly new. So at least with AI maybe i'll actually see something cool.
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u/zazzersmel Sep 04 '26
Nah but like I’ve used xoxos plugins and shit… the more things change the more they stay the same
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u/00ipg Sep 05 '26
Like another comment said, you can get some fab filter and uad plugins and be just fine. If you wanna avoid all the crap that's coming about nowadays you can just stick to the classics. That's what I do.
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u/nekomeowster Hobbyist Sep 06 '26
I stick to what I know and what I trust. Haven't been that interested in trying new plugins regardless and vibe-coding certainly doesn't help.
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u/uncia_audio Sep 07 '26
I care much more about knowing exactly what a processor is doing and how it fits into my workflow than constantly replacing tools. The knowledge you build around a familiar tool is part of the tool.
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u/ickN Sep 03 '26
You didn’t know about the code behind the plugin in the past either. I don’t understand the issue.
If you know what you’re doing you can make products as good as any mid level dev using AI.
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u/Rapscagamuffin Sep 03 '26
i dont understand what you are worried about? are you worried that vibe coded plugin is going to harm your computer?
if you are able to do everything you need to do, isnt it a good thing that you dont have to buy anymore plugins or that someone has vibecoded a plugin thats free or cheap that does the same thing as an expensive plugin?
i mean, theres already more music, movies and books than you and your entire family could ever read with 10 life times, but people still keep makin em. should we just stop?
just keep makin music, man. no reason to be scared of plugins.
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
I wouldn't use anything done without care. And everything vibe-coded is just done for the sake of financials, but not because of passion or whatever. They are all ugly, and same. They don't do anything that is already done hundreds of times. And they are usually one person, so there's no reliability.
I don't want to look at the generated images, as well as vibe-coded anything. They are just ugly.
They always come with problems. We didn't have any Cloudflare issues before LLMs, but now, once in a couple of times, all the websites on the internet (including ours) go down because some LLM made a mistake while updating something.
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u/kobygotmilk Sep 03 '26
“ And everything vibe-coded is just done for the sake of financials, but not because of passion or whatever.” How can you possibly know that? Like, are you in people’s head? Did you test every single vibe-coded plugin on the planet? I know for a fact 4 kids making great plugins out of passion. They couldn’t make them before AI because it was either too expensive or it would require them to spend years learning how to code. Their plugins are free, one charge for them. Each and everyone of them spend an average of 6-8 months developing a single plugin, WITH THE HELP OF AI. That’s a lot. Yeah, of course you’ll find plugins made in a day, shitty vibe coded garbage. But you can also find some great ones, that were made with love and passion. Also, I’m in the industry. I can guarantee you that for the past 2 years EVERY SINGLE big plugin developer, and I’m talking about the biggest ones that you “trust”, uses AI to either test or code their plugins.
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u/Rapscagamuffin Sep 03 '26
you said it was ok for people to try new things and make their dreams come true before but now it seems like youre saying the opposite. it doesnt seem like you think its OK at all?
the rest of what you said is fine and understandable. i dont want to look at or use ugly generated anything either. i dont think anyone wants to use something that doesnt have any care put into it.
so dont use them? keep using the tools you trust from the brands you trust. its a new and novel concept to have this kind of capability so theres a flood of crap. objective crap doesnt usually stick around for long but even crap can get attention if its novel. much sooner than later this kind of capability will no longer be new and itll just be useless turds that no one even thinks about.
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u/ThoriumEx Sep 03 '26
Why would you be afraid of if?
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
I'm afraid that it might hurt the industry in the long term, as I said in the original post.
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u/ThoriumEx Sep 03 '26
I understand your concerns about the industry, I just don’t understand why are you afraid of trying new plugins, even if they’re vibe coded.
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
I'm copying a comment I wrote to a similar question here:
I wouldn't use anything done without care. And everything vibe-coded is just done for the sake of financials, but not because of passion or whatever. They are all ugly, and same. They don't do anything that is already done hundreds of times. And they are usually one person, so there's no reliability.
I don't want to look at the generated images, as well as vibe-coded anything. They are just ugly.
They always come with problems. We didn't have any Cloudflare issues before LLMs, but now, once in a couple of times, all the websites on the internet (including ours) go down because some LLM made a mistake while updating something.
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u/ThoriumEx Sep 03 '26
I get the sentiment but at the end of the day you’re judging an end product, not the creating process of it. It could sound/look trash even if it was programmed manually. It’s not like we didn’t have crappy plugins or fraudulent marketing before, even from large companies.
Just like when you’re judging a final mix you only care how it sounds, it’s irrelevant if it was made with an automatic ozone preset or if it was ran through the most prestigious hardware.
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Sep 03 '26
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u/ThoriumEx Sep 03 '26
Because he didn’t say “avoid crappy plugins”, he said “I’m afraid to try new plugins because they might be made in a way I don’t like and I have no way of knowing”.
Just use the damn thing and love/hate it based on your experience with it, there’s nothing to be afraid of.-1
Sep 03 '26
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u/ThoriumEx Sep 03 '26
He literally said “I’m anxious, stopped trying new plugins because I don’t know about the code behind it”.
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u/Duckmeister Sep 03 '26
Why not be inspired to make your own plugins now that you have the ability readily available to you?
Given what we know now of many plugins before vibecoding, particularly that they are deceptively simple, or clones of one another, or rely on placebo/marketing, is vibecoding really that much worse than another waveshaper marketed as a magic box?
Vibecoded plugins aren't going to harm you or your computer. How did you evaluate plugins before...you listened to them? Can you tell if a plugin is vibecoded based on listening to it? If a plugin does something you want, does it matter if it was vibecoded or not?
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
- I actually made myself something that simply lives on my computer only.
- DSPs are far away from being simple.
- I probably cannot tell if it's vibe-coded or not by just listening. I just know what I like or don't like. And I never needed a vibe-coded plugin ever. And whenever I tried one, there were always weird issues or an unusual approach to it. I don't believe there can be, but let's say there's a vibe-coded plugin that does exactly what I want. I wouldn't pay a penny for it because I can make the same with even a free account. So why pay?
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u/Duckmeister Sep 03 '26
Agreed on all points, I don't know what the point of this post is then other than "don't buy something you could make yourself"
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u/bokkal1 Sep 03 '26
There's literally no point other than just sharing ideas and having a little chat about the topic while having a beautiful coffee.
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u/tempe1989 Sep 03 '26
I think the next jump will be in workflow, it’d be amazing to have a similar system to Slate VMR. Blue Cat Patchwork is great but it’s still opening multiple windows. VMR is great but hasn’t replaced Soundtoys and a few others for me yet.
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u/saucyCT Sep 03 '26
Yep. I think I am the same, though I still go out and check out new developers when there is some “word on the street” that something is decent (and novel?) I happily found the Naturl Audio AL-1. And I am pretty sure I have been spending more time with demos too. These days it takes a lot more than another comp emulation to get me interested though. But I’m not anxious because we already have amazing digital tools available.
1
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u/Djinnwrath Sep 03 '26
I know just enough about programming to know all code is cobbled together nonsense that barely works.
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u/kobygotmilk Sep 03 '26
“ I'm surprised that they can even ask for money for something we can also make by just kindly asking another LLM (they say prompting)” well, then do it. What’s the problem? Also, LLM or not, developing a high quality plugin requires extensive knowledge and tons of testing. A vibe coded plugin can be world class, as long as you understand DSP and know what you’re doing. Just as a vibe coded plugin can be shit because it was generated in one prompt. So. If that’s a problem to you and if vibe coding is so easy: do it. Do the plugins. Hell, use even two LLMs while you’re at it. Come back to me after a month and tell me if you were able to develop a good plugin without DSP or general audio knowledge. Do it. Also, “I’m surprised they can even ask for money”. Okay, by this logic, more than 50% of goods are manufactured by robots. Literally from A to Z. Should those manufacturers be demonetised? LLM, robot or human labour - if effort and time was spend, it’s always justified to ask for money in return. That’s free market. You don’t like it? Don’t buy it.
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u/Servus_of_Rasenna Sep 03 '26
"we can also make by just kindly asking another LLM"
Are you so sure that it's that easy? Have you tried it? If it is so easy, why do you care about new plugins at all? If you want something, you can just make it yourself, right?
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u/techoptio Sep 03 '26
The fear around the use of AI in code is unnecessary. I'd even argue a good dev is doing themselves a disservice by not using AI these days.
Apple and Netflix have both been found with CLAUDE.md files, meaning they're using AI internally too.
If the plugin works as intended, why do you care if AI was involved?
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u/Zak_Rahman Sep 03 '26
I have been happy with my plugins for a long time now.
I never considered this, but this is a thing.
100% NI will do this.
I don't see other developers doing this - but that's speculation.
If U-he embrace AI I will cry and probably finally commit to buying an analog synth.
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26
You literally won't know a difference either way. You will have no clue whether the devs used it or not.
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u/Zak_Rahman Sep 04 '26
Not the point.
I have problems with waves stealing algorithms for their shit plugins.
I do not want to reward theft.
That is a twisted way of seeing things you have.
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
My way of looking at it is quite normal. It's the practical viewpoint of a software engineer who understands what he is talking about. Your way of seeing things, however, is quite naive and uninformed. It's the viewpoint of someone who neither knows what AI is actually doing or how it's being used in industry, nor how DSP programming works.
Who steals algorithms? And how? How do you think any of this actually works? You know that most major DSP algorithms are freely available in white papers (academic research papers), right? This is how research and academia in math & computer science works.
Most plugins are not inventing novel DSP algorithms in any way. They are applications of known algorithms and techniques stitched together in creative ways to produce a product. The devs will tweak values and different pieces of an interconnected system (multiple algorithms/techniques used in series or parallel) to produce the interesting aesthetic results, but they generally aren't inventing anything new. The formalization of most math used in DSP programming (Fast Fourier Transforms, Finite and Infinite Impulse Responses, Least Mean Squares, Kalman filters, etc.) happened 50-70 years ago.
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u/Zak_Rahman Sep 04 '26
Look up Lavender.
It is absolutely being used for evil and most of us want no part of that.
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u/deeplywoven Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
I'm well aware of what Lavender is, but that has literally nothing at all to do with anything else you've said previously in any way. You're just randomly moving goalposts.
Israel using Lavender for evil things/in a dystopic way has literally nothing to do with your uninformed, wild claims about "Waves stealing algorithms." Lavender isn't even an LLM. You're just exposing that you know basically nothing about AI here.
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u/ScotiaMinotia Sep 03 '26
There’s been an explosion of posts on forums with random people saying they’ve “built” a new plugin. I avoid all of those like the plague unless I can see clear evidence that they are a proper developer.
Of course AI is being used everywhere to code, but it needs to be overseen by experienced developers. Not the same as vibe coded trash that will be broken in 6 months.