Reflections on Vibe Coding, Vibe Engineering and the future
I just scrolled my x.com feed for about 15 min in the morning to see if there was something new that I should catch up on. It wasn’t, but it left me with a feeling that I wanted to write a short thing about.
Quality, understanding, diligence, pride, solid work.
Non-technical people are pushing the narrative
CEOs, marketers, VC funded startups hungry for money, journalists, investors and bartenders are all pushing the narrative hard.
At this point it must be safe to say that its trillions of dollars behind this narrative. So its not werid at all that programmers are not being heard.
Coding is dead. I can do it myself. It takes no time. It works great. Look at my app that I created in two hours. We don’t need programmers. We can cut half our workforce because of AI.
We hear it constantly.
---I push 10 000 lines every day. I make $100k/mo from my vibe coded app. I needed an X, so I spent two hours building it myself.---
It’s a slip and slide
When the first wave of vibe coding started to become a thing, everyone agreed that it was shaky and we should be careful about trusting it. That it was sub-par to humans doing programming. The distrust for ai-generated code was real. “We can use it to prototype, but not in production” was the agreement.
Programmers started banding around “Vibe Coding is not safe, but Vibe Engineering is”.
Over time, all vibes seem to be put on the same level of trust.
The general population and non-technical people have no chance of grasping the difference between an application written 100% by humans or 100% by agents. They could maybe have a small gut feeling if they see visible errors. But visible errors are the easiest to correct for a vibe coder anyway…
They don’t know that these applications are less secure, less likely to be working correctly over time, less likely to be maintained well, and so on.
Lets just play with two scenarioes
In the first scenario you are using an application built 100% by humans. Real programmers that look through all the code, has built up their understanding over many years, will get fired if they do a big blunder and have kids and spouses depending on them.
In the second scenario, you have a 25-year-old guy who works in a bar in the evenings and has 10 of the most epic startup ideas that he discusses with all of his friends. He has zero kids, zero responsibilities and just want to make money.
The application you are using is for backing up all the images you have on your phone. They are images of you, your kids, your family, and all the acitivies you guys have been doing for years. You are also a public person and very private to protect your family.
Well, you know where this is going… It’s obvious if you are a programmer yourself. You are still one of the few that actually still belives in the risk of vibe coding.
The chances of a company with professional programmers doing a huge blunder where your personal information is leaked is very low. The likelyhood of the images getting lost is also very low.
While the vibe coder, detached from how everything works, just needs one bad prompt. The vibe coder just needs one bad migration, one bad permission rule, one bad package, and your images are either gone or accessed by someone else.
So now what?
I don’t know. I keep relecting on this, but the real answers are in the future.
I do, however, take some indirect inspiration from characters like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. They have a high level of integrity and have strong mental models to follow.
Therefore I try to think, what is right. What is a morally good path to thread in the madness. How can I feel good about myself, no-matter the outcome.
I believe I can get further in life if I stick to what is good.
- Take pride in my work and what I build.
- Be diligent by learning, understanding, reading, and spending time.
- Expect high quality output from myself, not just slop.
- Know myself as someone who does solid work and others might too.
You do you. I do me. But I hope there is a league of people out there that join me on the path of staying true to the craft, even though it’s morphing quite fast.