Now, I have a lot of reasons to hate vibe coding, but one of them is that I just think more easily in code. I reason by writing the code. It's not something I can easily disentangle.
Architectures tend to live in my head as pictures that change as I write. The words are code. There's no intermediate. So the offer of being able to skip the poc phase is just not interesting. "Oh, cool, I can skip the part where I preemptively identify problems? Great. That's gonna work out well." Vibe coding can give you working proof of concepts that self destruct when you try to grow them (much like any poc code you just try to use without actually engineering).
I don't know that this problem will ever get fixed. Even if it does, I don't know that this fix will ever rival human engineering. I don't think it's actually possible to know that yet, there are too many factors at play. It's definitely lowered the bar for writing proof of concepts. Now a business idiot can make a proof of concept, which even further distorts their understanding of what engineering actually looks like.
In order to go back to work, I'm basically expected to be ramped up on LLM stuff. But it all keeps reminding me of the feeling of powerlessness when we organized against Trump, when we organized against the rally at UW, when I tried to stop someone from pepperspraying people and I got shot. It's all the same ideology of rapists and pedophiles forcing their entire world on us against our will, thinking they can dangle "the Epstein files" in front of everyone and then yank them away like nothing ever happened... Like no one knows they implicate the entire power structure.
"""
[…] and I opened the case (politely examined by the guards of the Palace at four stages of my approach to the Red Hall) that held my ansible and some pictures. The pictures—films, photos, paintings, actives, and some cubes—were a little gallery of Man: people of Hain, Chiffewar, and the Cetians, of S and Terra and Alterra, of the Utter-mosts, Kapteyn, Ollul, Four-Taurus, Rokanan, Ensbo, Cime, Gde and Sheashel Haven … The king glanced at a couple without interest. “What’s this?”
“A person from Cime, a female.” I had to use the word that Gethenians would apply only to a person in the culminant phase of kemmer [a cyclical period of heightened sexual activity during which secondary gender characteristics emerge], the alternative being their word for a female animal.
“Permanently?”
“Yes.”
He dropped the cube and stood swinging from foot to foot, staring at me or a little past me, the firelight shifting on his face. “They’re all like that—like you?”
This was the hurdle I could not lower for them. They must, in the end, learn to take it in their stride.
“Yes. Gethenian sexual physiology, so far as we yet know, is unique among human beings.”
“So all of them, out on these other planets, are in permanent kemmer? A society of perverts? So Lord Tibe put it; I thought he was joking. Well, it may be the fact, but it’s a disgusting idea, Mr. Ai, and I don’t see why human beings here on earth should want or tolerate any dealings with creatures so monstrously different. […]”
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness)
A long time ago, when I was still going to school, I often thought about some class or other: "What's the point of this? I'm just wasting time on stuff I won't ever need. And my grades are going down because of it." So I supported all these bright ideas like having schools work the curriculum out with the industry.
Nowadays, I know better. The purpose of school is not to produce ready-made employees. It's to give people a wider perspective. Perhaps they won't use most of what they learn there, perhaps they'll have bad memories of some classes, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you learn how to learn, how to reason, how to think.
I hate what's been happening to schools lately. They are becoming conveyor belts: we throw children on them, throw specific knowledge at them and see what sticks, we do exams and classify them. We expect to get a thoughtless laborer at the end, someone ready to take a specific job immediately.
A human whose only purpose in life is mindless labor and mindless consumption. Metaphorically, someone who's just going to spend their time off by drinking beer in the front of the TV and breeding more babies. Babies who will eventually become more cogs in the machine, fueling the infinite growth, trying to prevent this mindless system from falling apart.
#AntiCapitalism