I think the pretty universal answer in all these comments is “no”- I think that’s fair but I’d add sone caveats.
There’s a lot of negative sentiments here around LLMs, which I agree with, but I think it’s easy to imagine some hypothetical future where LLMs existing without the current water/energy overuse, hallucinations or big companies stealing individuals work. Whether that future is likely or not, I think it’s possible.
The main reason vibe coding isn’t solarpunk is that, taken by itself, it’s not in any way related to ecological stewardship, anti-capitalist community building, or anything else that’s core to solarpunk. Vibe coding might or might not be part of some “cool techy future” in the same way as flying cars, robots, and floating cities but that’s not a reason to consider it as solarpunk.
If you’re into LLMs and solarpunk, instead of arguing that LLMs are solarpunk, you can make efforts to push them to being more solarpunk. How can LLMs support communities instead of coorporations? How can, through weights sharing and various optimisations, we make LLMs less damaging to the environment? Etc. That’d at least be a solarpunk way to go about LLMs, even if LLMs aren’t inherently solarpunk.
That’s sad to hear- people on the internet can seem harsh, I thinks its probably too easy to forget there’s a real person behind most questions.
It’s been like a month now, and I still don’t really think LLMs are solarpunk, trying oto make them more.open and community based sounds worthwhile though, so good luck with it!
Massive side point, but if you’re interested on “empowering people who don’t want to deal with technical details of coding” check out ideas as a whole around “end user programming”. It’s a pretty broad church, but there’s some cool stuff happening under that term that it sounds like you’d like.