since the end of the push back season, i’ve seen an exponential amount of vibe coded projects published both in this forum and in many other places, including entire “libraries” of goop
some of the stuff that’s been made has been pretty good and still seems to have had a certain amount of effort put into it, while a lot of it can really just be considered slop.
what are yall’s opinions on this and how it affects the vex community as a whole?
Imo AI is a tool. It should totally be utilized, but not to write the entirety of a robot’s code
I think the community, and society more broadly, is going to have to learn that there’s a big difference between vibe coding something for your own use and actually engineering a product for other people to depend on.
There’s a lot of slop right now because tools like Claude Code have made people believe they can skip learning the basics of software engineering and architecture. Getting something to work is one thing. Making it secure, performant, private, scalable, and maintainable is something else entirely.
That doesn’t mean vibe coding is bad. It’s great for experimenting, learning, and building tools for yourself, and some genuinely good projects have come out of it. The problem is when someone takes an untested prototype and presents it as a reliable library or finished product.
I think this will sort itself out over time. People will learn what is actually valuable and what only looks impressive at first glance.
For VEX, the main principle should still be that the code a team runs needs to reflect the team’s skill level and understanding. If you use an AI-generated or poorly structured library, you should still be able to explain how it works, troubleshoot it when it breaks, and take responsibility for what it does. AI can help you write code faster, but it shouldn’t replace actually understanding the code.
I have also noticed that, and it honestly depresses me. I haven’t been in the V5 scene for long (I formed 53787N at the end of High Stakes), but my family has been around since ITZ in 202Z. Looking back at those days, I think it’s honestly degraded between now and then. I agree with @Chickee partially when he says this:
Yes, AI is a tool, however that doesn’t mean we should use it. I have used GPT once to make a practice schedule for our team based on availability of members, but other than that, we have a strict no-AI policy on our team.
In short, AI is acceptable for:
AI is not acceptable for:
Past GM issues, AI is also trained on certain proprietary libraries. Using AI comes with the risk of infringing copyright or committing plagiarism.
Always, and I mean always, check your libraries to make sure they’re human-made before continuing to use them.
If you use libraries and AI, good judges and JA’s might sniff it out. AI is only a tool for when you are stuck and no one can help. I would avoid it as anything more than a help.
As long as it is universally available to every student, it is a fair game.
Students will experiment with it, learn how to use it to the full potential, or realize that it is easier to learn programming themselves rather than keep explaining to the AI agent that robot didn’t pick that game piece correctly and it needs to change the code, but it is impossible to describe how.
Btw, an AI agent could be a very patient mentor to teach students how to code. I would encorage everyone to ask their AI agent to teach them “how to fish” instead of “catching a fish” for them to eat.
TL;DR at end.
IMHO AI is a tool that can and should be used, especially for coding. However, what sets a team that uses AI as a tool and uses AI as a crutch is their depth of fine tuning and their ability to explain their code in their Notebook and to the Judges.
A relevant anecdote is when my team member tried to use AI to code our robot, but then it ended up with 23 compilation errors. When he finally got it working, it was poorly optimised, and it took him way longer than it should have. On the other hand, I treated AI as a dev who didn’t really know how to think for himself, and I fed it all the syntax, and my flowchart, algorithms and ideations. The AI didn’t really know what was going on, because VEX especially is such a niche topic, but I fully knew what it was doing, simply because I had told it granularly what to do.
This meant that the AI didn’t really make any mistakes, nor was it slop, and the being which made mistakes/bugs in the code was me. This meant that I could also easily fix the code. Because I architected the algorithm and just made AI do the dirty work of typing out the program (I even debugged it myself lol), it meant that I was fully confident in how each and every line of the code worked and I could explain it in great ddetail in the Notebook and to the Judges.
I firmly believe that AI must be used in this way, because then otherwise it makes too many mistakes and is actually really inefficient…
TL;DR: People should use AI extensively in VEX/Coding, but they should be the architects of the code and design the algorithm themselves to prevent slop. AI will never make a bad coder good, it will make a good coder 20x faster at writing code at the same quality they usually do.
I fully agree. I didn’t see your comment before I wrote my own would have saved me a lot of trouble lol. I always mention a personal anecdote in regards to this topic of discussion…
AI will never be able to make a bad coder good. AI will only ever make a good coder write code to the standard they usually write code at, but around 20x faster.
Story time 
In Push Back, my teammate claimed that he could code the entire robot/auton using Claude Code in approx. 20 minutes. When he did, he never actually compiled or tested it, and told all of us (in a very self-assured manner) that he had fully finished the auton code.
Meanwhile, I (lead programmer) architected the program and wrote the algorithm myself. I then used AI to only write the code, and never really left it to make any descisions on its own. Prettty much all I used Claude for was to save me the wrist pain of typing for 5 hours straight (although the algorithm was pretty long so i did that anyways lol).
My teammate’s code has 23 compilation errors and failed at Nationals.
My code executed decently well, and I was able to EXPLAIN how my code worked to the Judges.
(For context, this all happened the night before Nationals, and I stayed up till 5 am coding)
We won Think award, even though we placed dead last in the tournament.
PS. here is the code which got us Think Award at Nats and qualified us to Worlds:
I agree with that to some extent. However, my concern is that many individuals are using these tools, as they’ve recently grown powerful enough to architect entire projects on their own.
My greatest concern is that much of the strategy and “innovation” components of VEX has been delegated to these AIs. Sure, these programmers can explain it during the interview as they do in fact have a rough understanding of how it works that the tool gave them, but they didn’t do any of the work implementing or deriving these strategies out.
This almost entirely ruins the advantage that those creative programmers have which I think is a very sad state for the VEX community to be in.
I see your point and largely agree. There will always be people who use AI tools the right way: to learn, experiment, and improve. But there will also be those who let the tools do all the work for them.
To be honest, programming a VEX robot is usually not that deep. Most code stays at a fairly basic, entry-level level. The most sophisticated parts are typically tasks or a few advanced features, with the exception of the small group of people who built PROS, JAR, EZ-Template, and similar frameworks.
A strong programmer using AI will almost always outperform a weak programmer using AI. That said, even a weaker programmer who knows how to ask the right questions can now generate competitive code.
One of the biggest issues is that competition judges are rarely equipped to properly evaluate code quality. An experienced software developer can usually spot whether someone truly understands their own code in under 30 seconds. Most judges simply can’t make that distinction.
The reality is that AI is here to stay. It will help us build incredible things, but it will also create real challenges around integrity and learning. VEX rules are clear: you’re expected to write your own code and fully understand it. Beyond that, it comes down to personal integrity.
Outside of VEX, anyone aspiring to be an engineer needs to become very proficient with AI tools. I doubt there will be many engineering jobs in the next decade that don’t treat strong AI fluency as a basic requirement. The real world already operates differently from education and competition settings.