Alright, settle down, grab a glass. Or don’t. Makes no difference to the march of progress, or whatever the hell they’re calling it this week. It’s Wednesday morning, the birds are chirping like tiny jackhammers inside my skull, and the first thing I see swimming up through the bottom of my coffee cup – besides my own bleary reflection – is this gem from Forbes about “Vibe Coding.”
Vibe. Coding.
Let that sink in. Like cheap whiskey hitting an empty stomach. Some genius, Andrej Karpathy – sounds like a Bond villain, probably drinks martinis, shaken not stirred, the prick – decides we don’t need actual code anymore. No, what we need is a vibe. You just gotta feel the software, man. Tell the magic box – the “TuringBot,” they call it, sounds like a failed Soviet appliance – what you kinda, sorta want, and poof! Software.
The code doesn’t matter, they say. Jesus H. Christ. That’s like saying the bricks don’t matter when you’re building a house, just the feeling of shelter. Or the engine doesn’t matter in a car, just the vibration of movement. I’ve had hangovers with more structural integrity than this idea.
Used to be, you had to bleed for your code. Late nights, lukewarm coffee that tasted like battery acid, banging your head against the wall until that one misplaced semicolon revealed itself like a cheap whore hiding under the bed. There was pain, there was suffering, there was the occasional moment of goddamn triumph when the thing finally worked. It was real.
Now? Nah. Just vibe it out. Got a bug? Don’t sweat it, pal. Don’t waste precious minutes understanding the problem. Just tell the TuringBot – God, I hate that name – to fix it. Or roll it back. Regenerate. Like hitting undo on a particularly bad night you wish you could forget. Keep hitting regenerate until it looks right. “Apparently working,” as the article puts it. That’s the gold standard now: apparently working. Like that blonde I met last Tuesday was apparently interested in my thoughts on compiler design.
They trot out Y Combinator, saying a quarter of their new startups are mostly AI-generated code. Kids raised on participation trophies and instant gratification, now building the future on code they didn’t write and don’t understand. They’re not developers; they’re prompters, whisperers to the machine. It’s like being a chef who just tells the microwave what dish to reheat. Sure, you get food, but you ain’t cooking, sweetheart.
And get this: developers are keeping their “hands off the keyboard and eyes on the bigger picture.” The bigger picture? What, the stock options? The exit strategy? The next round of funding based on software held together by digital chewing gum and good vibes? The keyboard is where the work gets done, you pathetic trust-fund babies. It’s where the sausage gets made, gristle and all. Taking your hands off the keyboard isn’t getting a higher perspective; it’s like a surgeon deciding scalpels are passé and they’re just going to will the appendix out.
Now, they admit this creates two kinds of “developers.” Gotta love the euphemisms. First, you got your “product engineers.” These are the vibe guys. They know the “domain,” they know the “steps,” but they don’t need to know the code. They just keep poking the AI bear until it shits out something that looks vaguely like the picture in their head. They orchestrate. They manage. They delegate… to a machine that hallucinates half the time. The article says the concern about developing good developers is gone because you’ll just “trust AI.” Trust AI? I wouldn’t trust AI to pour me a stiff drink, let alone build the backbone of our increasingly fragile digital lives. Trust is earned, usually the hard way, not coded by algorithm.
Then you have the “high-coding architects.” These poor bastards are the ones who still understand how the plumbing works. They’re the grown-ups left cleaning up the mess after the vibe kids have passed out in a puddle of their own apparently working code. They have to check the security, the performance, the stuff that actually matters when you’re not just building a demo for some venture capitalist asshole who wouldn’t know a buffer overflow if it bit him on his Patagonia-clad ass. They write, review, edit real code. You know, the stuff that matters. Sounds suspiciously like what we used to just call “programmers” or “engineers” before the marketing department got hold of the dictionary.
So, the barrier to entry is lower. Great. Just what we needed. More people who can generate crap faster. Like low-code/no-code was the gateway drug, and now we’re mainlining pure, uncut AI generation. Anyone with a pulse and a prompt can now be a “developer.” Build a weekend project! Whip up a demo! Sure. Knock yourself out. Build your little sandcastle with the magic AI shovel. But taking this shit into enterprise? Into systems that handle money, power grids, medical records? You’d have to be insane. Or a CEO. Often the same thing.
Need another smoke just thinking about it.
The solution? Testing! Of course! We’ll just get the vibe coders to ask the same goddamn AI that shat out the code to also generate the tests for it. Brilliant! Let the fox design the security system for the henhouse. Let the AI check its own homework. What could possibly go wrong? It’s like asking the bartender if you’ve had too much to drink. The answer is always tailored to keep the good times rolling, not to reflect reality. “Generate” and “Validate.” The new SDLC. Simplified, streamlined, and completely divorced from the messy reality of building things that don’t fall over when a stiff breeze blows.
They toss in some hand-wringing questions at the end, like they just realized maybe, just maybe, deploying code nobody understands into production might be a bad idea. Security vulnerabilities? Hallucinated features? Intellectual property nightmares? Data poisoning? Maintenance hell when the original “vibe” is long gone and nobody knows how the tangled mess of AI-generated spaghetti actually works? Yeah, maybe think about that before you declare the death of code, you morons.
“As AI improves, many of these concerns may diminish,” they say. That’s the mantra, isn’t it? The eternal optimism of the tech huckster. Don’t worry about the pile of burning tires now, because future AI will invent a magic fire extinguisher! It’s the same crap they peddled about self-driving cars being just around the corner, or blockchain solving world hunger. Hope is a fine breakfast, but it’s a shitty dinner, and it won’t fix buggy code.
Look, I get it. Tools change. I went from banging out copy on a typewriter that weighed more than my bar tab to using whatever fancy laptop the last freelance gig paid for. But the craft remained. The thinking remained. This vibe coding nonsense feels different. It feels like actively trying to remove the thinking, the understanding, the struggle. It’s outsourcing the messy, difficult, human part of creation to a silicon savant that doesn’t know its ass from its elbow, philosophically speaking.
They call it “democratization.” Sounds noble. What it really means is flooding the world with half-assed applications built on shaky foundations by people who mistake a good prompt for actual skill. It’s not democratizing development; it’s automating mediocrity.
So, we’ll have the Vibe Merchants, conjuring apps out of thin air and hype, focusing on the sizzle because they don’t understand the steak. And we’ll have the poor High-Coding Architects, the digital janitors, forever sweeping up the bugs, the security holes, the performance nightmares left behind, probably working twice as hard for half the recognition. Sounds like a recipe for a stable, reliable future, doesn’t it?
Yeah, maybe for a weekend project. Maybe for a quick demo to fool the money men. But for the real world? The messy, complicated, demanding real world? I’ll take a grizzled old coder who smells faintly of despair and cigarettes, who understands the machine down to the metal, over a thousand vibe-coding hipsters orchestrating TuringBots any day of the week.
This whole thing gives me a headache worse than cheap gin. Vibe coding. It’s not the future of software. It’s a symptom of a culture that values speed and appearance over substance and understanding. It’s the tech bro equivalent of ordering bottle service when you can’t afford rent. All flash, no foundation.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, the only vibe I’m interested in feeling right now is the warm embrace of a third whiskey. Or maybe a fourth. Someone’s gotta stay human around here.
Chinaski out. Time for a top-up.
Source: Vibe Coding: AI’s Transformation Of Software Development