Vibe coding is collapsing the distance between idea and deployment. But the real risk is whether your company has the judgment system to govern what AI can now build.
At first I thought vibe coding was just coding stuff for fun using whatever comes to your mind. Then I learned that it’s just letting ai code for you mostly and just copy paste the code.
Now I wonder if there are some cases of real vibe coding like my first assumption.
The danger here is that many people think that software is all about having code that seems to work when you try it. Those people have never been able to get past “Hello, World” in X for Dummies, so they don’t realize all the practical realities of software distribution that are very much more nuanced and complicated than just writing the code. They get their hands on some working code and wheeeee!!! Ship it!!!
A while back I compared LLMs to lightsabers - and pointed out how many amputees are found in the Galaxy far far away that has lightsabers.
There are a lot of folks saying that Bluesky’s recent outages were due to the vast amounts of vibe coding in their systems. It was days of not working.
As an “I wonder” exercise… say that BlueSky wasn’t vibe coded, but instead was done “the old fashioned way” with 20x as many people taking 10x as long to produce the same product. Over that 10x as long timeframe, would they have experienced less or more total downtime with traditionally coded software? Not theoretically perfect software, the actual stuff that “professionals” building social media sites write?
Also, if they have staffed up with the same number of people as were traditionally required, can those people respond to and correct issues slower or faster than a traditional team?
LLMs are powerful tools, which have evolved fairly dramatically in the area of software devleopment across the last 12 months. I suspect as people learn to use them properly, safely, appropriately, they are going to prove out to be quite useful. In the meantime, there will be mistakes made…
Over that 10x as long timeframe, would they have experienced less or more total downtime with traditionally coded software?
i have a homework for you: if you ask professional chef how to keep the cheese on pizza, are they going to tell you to use some glue? once you figure out an answer to that, you should be able to answer your original question.
There was an article a bit ago explaining that most AI companies are making a 95% loss. You know, spending 100, receiving 5 loss. All that debt is going to mean the price for AI is about 20 times lower than it needs to be just to break even. The software teams that came to rely on AI to save costs will soon enough find themselves on the hook for this mountain of debt. Enshitification is real. Enshitification is coming. AI will not stay cheap, convenient and free of advertising.
People forget this. Yes it has real use in very narrow contexts, yes it may get slightly better, but right now they are JUL getting the kids addicted to vapes.
At first I thought vibe coding was just coding stuff for fun using whatever comes to your mind. Then I learned that it’s just letting ai code for you mostly and just copy paste the code.
Now I wonder if there are some cases of real vibe coding like my first assumption.
Not copy-paste. Let the ai do it for you. …… else how would we get these entertaining stories of idiots letting ai delete their production database
The danger here is that many people think that software is all about having code that seems to work when you try it. Those people have never been able to get past “Hello, World” in X for Dummies, so they don’t realize all the practical realities of software distribution that are very much more nuanced and complicated than just writing the code. They get their hands on some working code and wheeeee!!! Ship it!!!
A while back I compared LLMs to lightsabers - and pointed out how many amputees are found in the Galaxy far far away that has lightsabers.
Or should produce “correct results.”
Yeah, vibe coding is such a fun term, too bad it’s used for this purpose.
Sort of like pickup artists
Sort of like pickup artists
There are a lot of folks saying that Bluesky’s recent outages were due to the vast amounts of vibe coding in their systems. It was days of not working.
As an “I wonder” exercise… say that BlueSky wasn’t vibe coded, but instead was done “the old fashioned way” with 20x as many people taking 10x as long to produce the same product. Over that 10x as long timeframe, would they have experienced less or more total downtime with traditionally coded software? Not theoretically perfect software, the actual stuff that “professionals” building social media sites write?
Also, if they have staffed up with the same number of people as were traditionally required, can those people respond to and correct issues slower or faster than a traditional team?
LLMs are powerful tools, which have evolved fairly dramatically in the area of software devleopment across the last 12 months. I suspect as people learn to use them properly, safely, appropriately, they are going to prove out to be quite useful. In the meantime, there will be mistakes made…
i have a homework for you: if you ask professional chef how to keep the cheese on pizza, are they going to tell you to use some glue? once you figure out an answer to that, you should be able to answer your original question.
There was an article a bit ago explaining that most AI companies are making a 95% loss. You know, spending 100, receiving 5 loss. All that debt is going to mean the price for AI is about 20 times lower than it needs to be just to break even. The software teams that came to rely on AI to save costs will soon enough find themselves on the hook for this mountain of debt. Enshitification is real. Enshitification is coming. AI will not stay cheap, convenient and free of advertising.
People forget this. Yes it has real use in very narrow contexts, yes it may get slightly better, but right now they are JUL getting the kids addicted to vapes.
The term you’re looking for is “cowboy coding.”
I resemble that remark - rode herd on a whole passel 'o C back in the early 90s.