❧ Alex Nedelcu writes that “people and organizations falling into the trap of no longer reading and writing code only do so at their peril.”

Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess. The reason is simple, yet hard to fix: code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply, because it takes months, years even, to notice the effects of bad architecture or of unmaintainable code.

This is a valid concern that developers (and especially professional ones) should take seriously. However, I wonder if AI won’t just advance further so that it can account for this. It was only a year or two ago that LLMs couldn’t reliably count the letters in “strawberry” or do basic arithmetic without falling apart — now they pass a lot of competition-math and even research-level problem benchmarks. So, maybe people won’t have to read code again. SEP 22

❧ If you’re not someone who has coded much, I’m not sure you can appreciate how merited the more reasonable hype around AI is. Things that used to take me weeks to do now take me hours. And more importantly, it’s allowed me to customize my computing experience more than I ever imagined would be possible.

No matter how much you love a piece of software, there is always a thing or two you wish it would do differently. More typically the software available to us is nothing like what we would want for a task, especially in terms of a UI that makes sense to us.

Now that coding agents have gotten quite good, however, I don’t hesitate to just write from scratch the app I want to use, with the exact UI and functionality I want, even if I already have a good enough commercial alternative. Todo lists, editors, whatever. And I will also make bespoke tools that do something for which I’m the only customer.

It’s remarkable what I can get done, and it makes me think that this power is going to have to show up in the productivity stats eventually. Even if it’s just software that AI supercharges.

Yet I can also see the downsides. Since I didn’t write this code myself, I don’t really understand it and don’t know how good it is. That may come back to bite me. Given my coding proficiency, however, I can’t believe it’s doing worse than I would do. That said, the real alternative to a vibecoded app is not one I would write by hand, but instead simply using the hardened commercial app. I’m also taking on a maintenance and upkeep tax whose size I can’t now appreciate.

And then there’s the addiction piece. This can’t be an original insight, but using AI lately has reminded me of Addiction by Design, the book on machine gambling about which Stably and I recently podcasted. Sitting alone at a machine, dropping in ‘credits’ and ‘tokens’ of inscrutable value, pulling a lever, getting back variable rewards, repeating this turn after turn, and ultimately losing track of time and oneself. In a way all flow is like this, but the jury may still be out on whether in the long run vibecoding induces the ‘good’ kind of flow that produces mastery and a sense of agency, or the ‘bad’ kind that surrenders agency to the machine’s rhythm. SEP 20