Vibe Coding

Yes, yes, yes, I know I haven’t done one of these for a while again, why? Been busy doing stuff, yes! Lots of stuff, well some stuff, stuff of varying degrees of interest that has absolutely prevented me from writing blog posts. Among the stuff that I have been up to is fully immersing myself in the beautifully infuriating world of “vibe” coding, that is mainly arguing with Artificial Intelligence (AI) about stuff. So grab yourself a coffee and prepare yourself for a glimpse into my world, plus I promise I won’t write the word “stuff” again.

There is a notion widely spouted by the big AI companies and various internet personalities that one can build a fully functioning web application with little effort or knowledge of coding. “No code solution” seems to be the phrase casually banded about. Well not in my experience. It is true that most of the Large Language Models (LLM’s) are very, very good at spitting out very nearly functional code very quickly, however in order to get these applications working properly takes more than a tad of coding knowhow, in fact quite often you will find yourself pointing out the problem, the AI agreeing with you, and then totally ignoring your suggestions. This process can be both unnecessarily time consuming and maddening, indeed it would often be far quicker to make the changes oneself, but wouldn’t that defeat the object of the “vibe”? Whatever the hell that means.

A recent advancement has been the emergence of the “thinking” model, which is where you can watch the LLM effectively talk to itself while working out solutions to the problem at hand. Once again at first glance these seem incredibly impressive and I freely admit that there is an odd feeling of superiority when you instruct an AI to do a task while you potter about, but alas, after the initial output the machine does tend to talk a better game than it delivers, which is the difference between being extra productive and not productive at all.

It is not my intention to constantly whine about AI. When it works, it can be genuinely helpful. It’s brilliant for boilerplate code, decent at explaining concepts, and occasionally surprises you with genuinely clever solutions to problems you hadn’t even thought of yet. The main issue is the fanfare surrounding it as a replacement to developers rather than what it is; a tool for developers.

The truth is that AI coding tools are most valuable to people who least need them. The more you know about development, the better you can leverage AI. The less you know, the more likely you are to end up with a beautifully crafted disaster.

So what does it all mean? Well it certainly means that my future is going to be a lengthy entanglement with the machines. They’re here to stay and If I want to coexist in harmony I have to be up for the fight, at least it opens the new market of fixing an ocean of beautifully crafted disasters! Life on the cutting edge eh?

Well that’s quite enough of this waffle, Good luck out there! Hurrah!