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Yeah but not until the next financial quarter so it’s all good right?
As long as you have a Golden Parachute in your contract!
Wait… Why do none of us have Golden Parachutes…?
You guys have parachutes?
I do! But it’s just an anvil with some string attached
Ooooh, that sounds awkward - let me take that golden anvil off your hands before it hurts you.
I jumped for a reason, why would I wear a parachute?
There’s a Blackberry docu-drama streaming on Netflix now - (Jay Baruchel - Hiccup from How to train your Dragon / Dave from 2010 Sorcerer’s Apprentice - has a leading role, it fits him well…) Real life tales of golden parachutes, compressed decision making, consequences…
Oh no i’m terrified to lose my “learning velocity.”
holy corporate word salad
I agree wholeheartedly with this article, however, it’s giving vibe-authored
The core problem was not simply the technology itself. It was the organizational inability to integrate AI into real workflows, learn from deployment and distinguish between a demo that worked and a system that delivered.
Yeah, it has that phrasing sometimes.
The missing Oxford comma… *twitch, twitch*
Forbes is just a bad source for news now.
This article is good, a rare exception in the current discourse around LLMs.
At first I thought vibe coding was just coding stuff for fun using whatever comes to your mind. Then I learned that it’s just letting ai code for you mostly and just copy paste the code.
Now I wonder if there are some cases of real vibe coding like my first assumption.
Yeah, vibe coding is such a fun term, too bad it’s used for this purpose.
Sort of like pickup artists
Sort of like pickup artists
The danger here is that many people think that software is all about having code that seems to work when you try it. Those people have never been able to get past “Hello, World” in X for Dummies, so they don’t realize all the practical realities of software distribution that are very much more nuanced and complicated than just writing the code. They get their hands on some working code and wheeeee!!! Ship it!!!
A while back I compared LLMs to lightsabers - and pointed out how many amputees are found in the Galaxy far far away that has lightsabers.
Or should produce “correct results.”
Produce correct results even when encountering “edge cases.”
Not crash, even when encountering “edge cases.”
Work correctly in all deployment environments.
Work correctly after scope creep multiplies the feature set by 3x, 10x, 30x… yeah, successful projects experience that kind of expansion.
Work correctly after the operating environments shift under your feet - can the code be updated to work with the next version of Android? iOS? Windows? Linux? After “security updates” take away the infrastructure you were depending on for correct functioning?
Will it scale to 100 users? 10,000? 10,000,000?
What happens when “threat actors” actively target the system?
What happens when your methods / development processes aren’t compliant with new government regulations?
Are you ready for IP lawsuits, whether deserved or not?
Not copy-paste. Let the ai do it for you. …… else how would we get these entertaining stories of idiots letting ai delete their production database
Move fast, break things LOL
The term you’re looking for is “cowboy coding.”
I resemble that remark - rode herd on a whole passel 'o C back in the early 90s.
There are a lot of folks saying that Bluesky’s recent outages were due to the vast amounts of vibe coding in their systems. It was days of not working.
As an “I wonder” exercise… say that BlueSky wasn’t vibe coded, but instead was done “the old fashioned way” with 20x as many people taking 10x as long to produce the same product. Over that 10x as long timeframe, would they have experienced less or more total downtime with traditionally coded software? Not theoretically perfect software, the actual stuff that “professionals” building social media sites write?
Also, if they have staffed up with the same number of people as were traditionally required, can those people respond to and correct issues slower or faster than a traditional team?
LLMs are powerful tools, which have evolved fairly dramatically in the area of software devleopment across the last 12 months. I suspect as people learn to use them properly, safely, appropriately, they are going to prove out to be quite useful. In the meantime, there will be mistakes made…
There was an article a bit ago explaining that most AI companies are making a 95% loss. You know, spending 100, receiving 5 loss. All that debt is going to mean the price for AI is about 20 times lower than it needs to be just to break even. The software teams that came to rely on AI to save costs will soon enough find themselves on the hook for this mountain of debt. Enshitification is real. Enshitification is coming. AI will not stay cheap, convenient and free of advertising.
People forget this. Yes it has real use in very narrow contexts, yes it may get slightly better, but right now they are JUL getting the kids addicted to vapes and it is drawing ungodly amounts of power and electricity to do so.
The meat you eat has more of an impact on the environment than electricity from AI usage
And which vehicle you go to work in dwarfs them both. Two things can be true at the same time.
Three things here:
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right nowthey’re basically discovering what are real uses and what’s frivolous non-value add uses.
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at least as used for software development, the past 12 months didn’t get slightly better, it got dramatically night to day better.
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simultaneously, some pretty significant advances have been made at reducing costs of delivering value. I think this is hitting hardest in basic chatbot areas, getting the simple answers cheaper - in programming not as clearly, yeah it’s getting the simple answers cheaper there too, but it’s also succeeding at getting much more complex answers that just weren’t possible even a few months ago - those answers cost more, but they’re also worth more… will be interesting to see where this all shakes out.
Yeah, they are running loss leader stuff, yeah it’s going to go up in price when they figure out what its worth to people, because things aren’t priced at what they cost to make or deliver, things are priced at what people are willing to pay. The players with the deep pockets are jockeying for control of future markets, they’re investing their existing wealth in future power. Let’s hope the winners are slightly less ghoulish than our Oil barons.
Let’s hope the winners are slightly less ghoulish than our Oil barons.
What a foolish hope!
$200,000,000,000 debt.
Who well pay it?
You talk like gravity doesn’t exist!You’re wrong if you think that it won’t be heavily reliant AI customers like software companies who spend five years removing codewriting skills from their workforce and building up technical debt in their codebase because no one has to understand it in those five years and there’s a lot of subtle, hard to spot bugs that got through code review because humans simply don’t make those kinds of errors and no one ever had to spot one in their life before claude came along.
Did you think that enshitification wouldn’t affect the product? Yesterday’s computers and cars were easy to disassemble to replace parts. Now it’s much, much harder, and it’s very common to void your warranty if you do that. Today’s ai generated code is easy to tinker with and you can do what you like with your end product. Why would it stay that way? Why wouldn’t they engineer it to make that harder? It’s not difficult to make code confusing by changing variable names. I could fuck up your codebase for humans by simply swapping names like productSKU and customerID, let alone writing obfuscated code for any purpose whatsoever and with whatever variable names I like.
Some software companies are outsourcing their talent to AI behemoths with mountains of debt to recoup. Guess who’s going to pay the debt! And what’s the point of such a company in the long run? Why are you speedrunning paying to replace yourself?
There will be an AI crash and “consolidation”, meaning a switch to monopolies or near monopolies. Some companies are shedding institutional knowledge and programming skill like it was waste water. Once dependence comes, value extraction will follow it like disease follows unvaccinated infection.
There is already $200bn in debt and growing rapidly. The shareholders aren’t going to be paying it. The ai customers are.
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Over that 10x as long timeframe, would they have experienced less or more total downtime with traditionally coded software?
i have a homework for you: if you ask professional chef how to keep the cheese on pizza, are they going to tell you to use some glue? once you figure out an answer to that, you should be able to answer your original question.
Yeah, the big thing is that management has no sense how little coding you actually do in a software engineering role. You spend so much more time understanding requirements, understanding how you can resolve roadblocks within your organization and understanding what the hell the code does that was previously written.
In particular, the last part is something that will most definitely take longer for vibecoded programs.
The code is often needlessly complex, because:- folks throw in additional features with no restraint,
- the AI will gladly generate a second implementation for stuff, you already solved in the codebase, and
- AI-generated code tends to just be noisy, because you need rigorous logical reasoning to find the most minimal solution.
But you also just don’t have human beings that made all the detail decisions and can tell you why they’re important. In vibecoded code, all of these detail decisions are accidental and only ‘proven’ in so far as the given accidental state that the code is in, happens to not explode in reality. If you need to tweak anything about it, you’re completely blind as to what’s actually important and what’s just in there, because the AI figured, it’s the most likely thing to autocomplete there.
Good article. Any company doing any of those examples deserves to die.
The companies that will pull ahead in the next 24 months are not the ones that adopt fastest. They are the ones whose judgment systems are mature enough that adoption does not break them.
Yeah, judgement doesn’t seem to be a high priority for the a.i. addled mind.
No one had the cultural standing to say this looks great, and we are not putting it into production.
Can someone in your organization look at a slick prototype and say “no” without career risk? If the answer is no, vibe coding becomes a one-way ratchet.
This is definitely the feeling at my company. “How fast is AI letting you ship” is the only question management & executive are asking.
the resulting ambiguity will be filled by whoever moves fastest, which is rarely whoever should be deciding.
There’s capitalism!
Can someone in your organization look at a slick prototype and say “no” without career risk? If the answer is no
You have toxic leadership and we have just handed them a mini-gatling-gun with which to shoot everyone’s feet off.
The real vibe coding is a bottle of beer and a lotta fuck it
