Jesus. Monday morning. Sun’s stabbing through the cheap blinds like it’s got a personal grudge. Head feels like a sack of wet cement someone left out in the rain. Coffee tastes like battery acid and desperation. And what fresh hell does the internet cough up today? “Vibe Coding.” Sounds like something you’d hear whispered in a crystal shop, not something that’s supposed to be changing how we build the digital cages we all live in.
Need a cigarette.
Right, so some suits over at Forbes, or maybe just some poor bastard trying to make rent writing for them, are pushing this “Vibe Coding” thing. Apparently, some fella named Andrej Karpathy – sounds like a Bond villain, maybe he is – coined the term. The gist? Forget sweating over semicolons and curly braces. Forget understanding the goddamn guts of the machine. Just… feel the software, man. Tell the AI the vibe you’re going for.
The vibe.
I knew a guy once, Three-Fingered Louie down at the track, said he picked horses based on their vibe. Said he could feel their winning energy. Louie lost his shirt, his car, and damn near his other two fingers betting on vibes. Now the propellerheads want us to build critical infrastructure this way? Sweet Jesus, pour me another. Make it a double.
The article gushes about how AI changed coding. Yeah, no shit. We got ChatGPT spitting out Python scripts like a drunken poet spitting out bad verses. We got these “copilots” whispering sweet nothings in your editor. Saves time, they say. Makes things easier. Maybe. Or maybe it just makes programmers lazier, more detached from the actual nuts and bolts. Used to be you had to wrestle with the logic, bleed for the algorithm. Now you just type “Make me a thing that does the thing” and hope the ghost in the machine gets it right.
Prompt-driven programming. N-of-1 programming. Now Vibe Coding. Sounds like a progression into pure abstraction, like trying to describe the color blue to a blind man using interpretive dance. The idea here, according to Karpathy the villain (or professor, whatever), is that the human acts as a sort of… artistic director. You don’t write the code. You don’t even read the code. You just tell the AI, “Hey, Skynet, buddy, make it feel more… synergistic. Give it that disruptive jazz.” And the AI, bless its little silicon heart, churns out version after version, running tests, tweaking things, until the vibe is just right.
The code itself? Might as well be written in ancient Sumerian for all the human “guide” understands it. Karpathy’s note apparently mentioned the code can “grow beyond the human’s comprehension very quickly.” You don’t say. Like a tumor? Or a particularly aggressive hangover?
There’s an example in this piece. Some scientist type wanted a simulator for a chemical reaction. Knew the name of the reaction, had some data. Fed it to the AI. First try? No good. Like my first try at quitting smoking. Then the guy “explored real-world complications” with the AI. “Leveraged my domain knowledge,” he says. Sounds like he vaguely pointed the AI in a few directions. “Add some of this common crap, see what happens.” Ten or fifteen tries later, bingo. Simulation kinda matched the data. Close enough for government work, or at least, close enough for a Forbes article.
And here’s the kicker: “I read the code every few iterations, but not every time.”
Not. Every. Time.
Let that sink in. You’re building something, presumably something important if it involves chemical reactions, and you’re just glancing at the blueprints occasionally? Like checking the stove is off by smelling for gas from the living room? What could possibly go wrong? It’s like trusting a bartender to mix your drink based on the vibe of your sadness. You might get bourbon, you might get bleach. Depends on his vibe that day.
Another cigarette. The coffee’s gone cold. Or maybe it was always cold. Hard to tell these days.
Now, the article gets down to brass tacks, or what passes for them in the MBA-sphere. What does this Vibe nonsense mean for “Business”? Because that’s always the bottom line, isn’t it? Not truth, not beauty, not even basic goddamn functionality. Just the bottom line.
First up: Should businesses use code no human understands? The article tries to soften the blow, saying, “Hey, we already got old code nobody gets!” Yeah, legacy code. Code written by guys who are dead or working at a different nuthouse now. Code that, crucially, worked for years before everyone forgot how. It earned its inscrutability. This new stuff? Born baffling. It’s like hiring a guy who speaks only Klingon to run your nuclear reactor because he has a “good vibe.” Seems… suboptimal.
Then there’s Super speed prototyping. Oh, goody. Faster ways to churn out digital widgets and Minimum Viable Bullshit. Get those prototypes in front of customers before the ink is dry on the non-existent design docs. Validate that market fit! Disrupt those paradigms! Faster, faster, faster! Build it now, figure out what the hell it actually does later. Maybe. Sounds like a recipe for more half-baked apps cluttering up the world, promising salvation and delivering pop-up ads. Just what we needed.
What about the volume of code? It’s gonna explode, apparently. More code means more storage, more version control headaches, more intellectual property crap to fight over. More digital landfill piling up. Remember when storage was expensive? Now it’s cheap, so we fill it with AI-generated gibberish that nobody understands. Progress. Makes me want to go back to pen and paper. At least you know where the fire hazard is.
Testing, quality, security? Ah, the boring stuff. The article asks, how can developers review code they can’t read? How can they ensure it’s secure? Good fucking question. Maybe they can just ask the AI? “Hey, HAL, you didn’t put any backdoors in this thing, did you? Pinky swear?” If the developer is just the “vibe guide,” responsible for the what but not the how, who the hell is responsible when the how inevitably shits the bed and leaks everyone’s credit card numbers? The AI? Good luck serving papers to a cloud server.
Need another smoke. Where did I put that lighter? Ah, under this pile of… doesn’t matter.
Finally, the big one: What do software engineering teams look like? The article suggests this benefits senior engineers. The wise old wizards who have the “knowledge to select what to build” and the “instincts to detect trouble.” They become the Vibe Masters, the Gandalf the Grays of the server room, guiding the AI apprentices. Sounds great for them. What about everyone else? How do you become a senior engineer if you never actually wrestle with the code yourself? If your job is just describing vibes? Do junior engineers fetch coffee and adjust the mood lighting for the AI?
The article claims this isn’t the end of software engineers, just a “shift.” A shift from coding to “software development,” focusing on the “overall product.” Right. Like saying driving isn’t about steering or pedals anymore, it’s about the journey. Try telling that to the guy whose brakes just failed because the vibe-coded brake controller felt like taking a nap.
It suggests upskilling managers and having “discussions” about rolling this out with “guidelines.” Guidelines for what? How to cross your fingers? How to phrase your prompts so the AI doesn’t accidentally create sentient paperclips bent on world domination? Guidelines for trusting code you literally cannot comprehend? Sounds like corporate CYA bingo to me.
Look, I get it. Change happens. Tools get better, maybe. Automation takes over the grunt work. Fine. I spent twelve years sorting mail on the night shift; I know about grunt work. Maybe letting AI handle the tedious line-by-line coding isn’t the worst thing. Maybe it frees up humans to think about the bigger picture.
Or maybe it just disconnects us further from the things we build. Maybe “Vibe Coding” is just a fancy way of saying “winging it.” Trusting the gut, the feeling, the vibe. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you hit the trifecta. Sometimes you wake up next to someone whose name you don’t remember in a motel room that smells like regret and cheap disinfectant.
Human intuition, real intuition, comes from experience. From failures. From getting your hands dirty and your heart broken. It’s not about whispering sweet nothings to a machine learning model. It’s about knowing, deep down in your gut, forged through trial and error and too many hangovers, what might actually work and what’s likely to blow up in your face. Can an AI have that? Can it feel the panic of a looming deadline? The crushing weight of a bug you can’t find? The fleeting joy of finally making the damn thing work?
Maybe that’s the point. They want to take the messy, human part out of it. The struggle, the doubt, the occasional flash of genuine insight fueled by caffeine and nicotine and pure desperation. Replace it with clean, efficient, AI-generated code that nobody understands but everybody trusts because the tests passed and the vibe felt right.
It feels… sterile. Like those perfect plastic smiles on billboards. It lacks the grit, the grime, the beautiful, awful messiness of actual human creation. Maybe I’m just an old dinosaur yelling at the clouds, clinging to my whiskey and my cynicism. Maybe Vibe Coding is the glorious future, and we’ll all be sipping synth-cocktails while AI builds utopia.
Or maybe it’s just another layer of abstraction, another way to avoid facing the messy reality of what we’re doing. Another way to pretend we’re in control when we’re really just passengers on a train driven by algorithms we barely comprehend, heading somewhere we never intended to go. All based on a vibe.
Whatever. The sun’s still too bright. My head still hurts. And this whole Vibe Coding thing sounds like a good reason to start drinking early. Or maybe just keep drinking.
Chinaski out. Time to check the vibe of this bourbon bottle. Feels… promising.