Vibe coding

`1:53:33`

to create super novel things and a complete product, but they're starting to creep close to that. So if you are investing time now into becoming a really good vibe coder, maybe this is the right thing to do as if it's indeed a skill, we kind of meme about vibe coding, just like sitting back and it's in the name. But if you treat it seriously, a competitive vibe coder and get good at riding the wave of AI and get good at the skill of editing code versus writing code from scratch, it's possible that you can actually get farther in the long term. Maybe editing is a fundamentally different task than writing from scratch if you take that seriously as a skill that you develop. To me that's an open question. I just think, I personally, now you're on another level, but just me, just personally, I'm not as good at editing the code that I didn't write.

`1:54:35`

— No one is. — That's one different. — No one is of this generation, but maybe that's a skill. Maybe if you get on the same page as the AI, 'cause there's a consistency to the AI. It's like it really is a pair programmer with a consistent style and structure and so on. Plus with your own prompting, you can control the kind of wrote code you write. I mean, it could generally be a skill like. — That's the dream of the prompt engineer. I think it's complete pipe dream. I don't think editors exist that aren't good at writing. I've written a number of books. I've had a number of professional editors. Not all of them wrote their own great books, but all of them were great writers in some regard. You cannot give someone pointers if you don't know how to do it. It's very difficult for an editor to be able to spot what's wrong with a problem if you that it couldn't make the solution themselves. Editing, in my opinion, is the reward, the capacity to be a good editor

`1:55:36`

is the reward you get from being a good doer. You have to be a doer first. Now that's not the same as saying that vibe coding, prompt engineering won't be able to produce fully formed amazing systems even shortly. I think that's entirely possible, but then there's no skill left, which maybe is the greatest payoff at all. Wasn't that the whole promise of AI anyway, that it was just all natural language that even my clumsy way of formulating a question could result in a beautiful, succinct answer. That actually to me is a much more appealing vision that there's gonna be these special prompt engineering wizards who know how to tickle the AI just write to produce what they want. The beauty of AI is to think that someone who doesn't know the first thing about how AI actually works is able to formulate their idea and their aspirations for what they want, and the AI could somehow take that messy clump of ideas and produce something that someone wants. That's actually what programming has always been.

`1:56:37`

There's very often been people who didn't know how to program, who wanted programs, who then hired programmers, who gave them messy descriptions of what they wanted and then when the programmers delivered that back said, "Oh no, actually that's not what I meant. I want something else." AI may be able to provide that cycle. If that happens to the fullest extent of it, yeah, there's not gonna be as many programmers around, right? But hopefully presumably someone still, at least for the foreseeable future, have to understand whether what the AI is producing actually works or not. — As a interesting case study, maybe a thought experiment. If I wanted to vibe code Basecamp or HEY, and some of the products you've built, like what would be the bottleneck? Where would I fail along the way? — What I've seen when I've been trying to do this, trying to use vibe coding to build something real is you actually failed really early. The vibe coding is able to build a veneer

`1:57:39`

at the current present moment of something that looks like it works, right? But it's flawed in all sorts of ways. There are the obvious ways, the meme ways that it's leaking all your API keys, it's storing your password in plain text. I think that's ultimately solvable. Like it's gonna figure that out or at least it's gonna get better at that, but its capacity to get lost in its own labyrinth is very great right now. It code something and then you wanna change something and it becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Real quick, Pieter Levels who've been doing this wonderful flight simulator was talking to that where at a certain scale, the thing just keeps biting its own tail. You wanna fix something and it breaks five other things, which I think is actually uniquely human because that's how most bad programmers are. At the certain level of complexity with the domain, they can't fix one thing without breaking three other things. So in that way I'm actually in some way it's almost a positive signal for that the AI is gonna figure this out because it's done an extremely human trajectory right now.