Yes, vibe coding is part of the great LLM marketing campaign. I'm old enough to be skeptical of things that are overhyped.<p>That doesn't mean it's a fad or generally bad. It's a great way to implement ideas and then validate them. A dream for startups. It doesn't matter if founders can't even write their "hello world" when validating an idea.<p>The downside is as with all AI generated code comes during the lifecycle of the code: Who's responsible? Who knows what the code does? Who's going to maintain it beyond AI? Is it secure? Reliable? I don't care about the next Tic Toc clone being written by AI, but how about software in the nuclear plants that is powering all the AI? Or in transportation, medical devices?
I certainly don't hate vibe coding as much as this person, but having tried it a few times, the thing that really worries me is "the slippery slope" he describes at the end and that's true with AI assistance in general. I think learning new programming languages probably expands your mind in ways that is somewhat immeasurable, and using AI to work with unknown languages takes away from that, and in general, I wonder what happens if you go from troubleshooting problems like 5 times a week, to once every 3 weeks because most problems fix themselves. And I do wonder if that will have a broader impact on the quality of your thinking as an engineer.
I used ChatGPT to help me write some complex functionality in Rust - which I am relatively new to - and the initial efficiency was amazing. I learnt a lot and I also ran into some cases where ChatGPT wasn’t much help.<p>For me, it is a better search engine - but we still have to do hard work and due diligence - and debugging.<p>Overall, we have to embrace LLMs - and whatever tech comes next - and ensure it is used for betterment of humanity.<p>Tech has also always been used to subjugate others, create deep fakes, wage wars, kill, surveil, discriminate and worse - and AI tech is going to be no different. We have to ensure that guardrails are put and the tech is not abused.