I started a local vibecoders group because I think it has the potential to help my community.
(What is vibecoding? It’s a new word, coined last month. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)
Why might it be part of a solarpunk future? I often see and am inspired by solarpunk art that depicts relationships and family happiness set inside a beautiful blend of natural and technological wonder. A mom working on her hydroponic garden as the kids play. Friends chatting as they look at a green cityscape.
All of these visions have what I would call a 3-way harmony–harmony between humankind and itself, between humankind and nature, and between nature and technology.
But how is this harmony achieved? Do the “non-techies” live inside a hellscape of technology that other people have created? No! At least, I sure don’t believe in that vision. We need to be in control of our technology, able to craft it, change it, adjust it to our circumstances. Like gardening, but with technology.
I think vibecoding is a whisper of a beginning in this direction.
Right now, the capital requirements to build software are extremely high–imagine what Meta paid to have Instagram developed, for instance. It’s probably in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s likely that only corporations can afford to build this type of software–local communities are priced out.
But imagine if everyone could (vibe)code, at least to some degree. What if you could build just the habit-tracking app you need, in under an hour? What if you didn’t need to be an Open Source software wizard to mold an existing app into the app you actually want?
Having AI help us build software drops the capital requirements of software development from millions of dollars to thousands, maybe even hundreds. It’s possible (for me, at least) to imagine a future of participative software development–where the digital rules of our lives are our own, fashioned individually and collectively. Not necessarily by tech wizards and esoteric capitalists, but by all of us.
Vibecoding isn’t quite there yet–we aren’t quite to the Star Trek computer just yet. I don’t want to oversell it and promise the moon. But I think we’re at the beginning of a shift, and I look forward to exploring it.
P.S. If you want to try vibecoding out, I recommend v0 among all the tools I’ve played with. It has the most accurate results with the least pain and frustration for now. Hopefully we’ll see lots of alternatives and especially open source options crop up soon.
I kinda get that people somehow like the overall idea of this approach.
But who is, excuse my french, fucking maintain that crap in the long run?
nobody, i’d guess. everyone just vibecodes their own personal shovelware. if theres any bugs, they just make some new slop and hope it’s less buggy than the old slop.
As a senior developer with 20+ years of coding behind, I am fairly excited at coding LLMs and use them a lot. And I realize now how little my coding ability actually matters in my job. What matters, and what I find the most interesting is the deep understanding of the various stacks that form the precarious edifice of modern IT.
We will maintain lower layers like we always did: with tons of tests, with strict APIs and with explicit invariants. The coding may change, but the engineering practices remain.
I am very excited at the idea that we have to design all the new best practices for this type of things. Imagine a coding pipeline with strict tests where, when a bug is found, we can just write a new test to demonstrate it and let the models figure out how to fix it without breaking the past tests.
lol, fair point. <3
I do hope we use it judiciously. So far, I’ve found the “biggest bang for your buck” to be at beginning a new project. But I’m also wary of vibecoding in its extreme form of “just press accept”.