I’ve used Grok a couple of times to create custom graphics to go with articles on the blog, but aside from that I’ve barely considered using AI for anything. Sometimes the AI-generated email conversation summaries on Gmail are helpful, but they just happen and don’t require any direct interactions from me. As such, I’m in no position to make sweeping declarations about the current state of the AI revolution … but Freddie deBoer has thoughts he’s shared on his Substack:
You are aware, I imagine, of “vibe coding”. The large language models that have received so much fanfare in the past four years have thus far not delivered on the outsized promises that have been made on their behalf; limitless free energy, an end to hunger, and immortality have all conspicuously eluded us. One thing that LLMs really appear able to do well, though, is to write code. And this proficiency has gotten sufficiently advanced that many people now write software solely through directing an LLM, without necessarily having any actual programming skills themselves. The overwhelming majority of the output of this effort is useless or redundant or barely functional, true, but the mere fact that people can do it is an interesting statement on what “AI” is actually good at. And for stupid meme reasons we call this practice vibe coding.
So, in the past two-ish years, several hundred million human beings acquired the ability to write software by speaking to a machine in ordinary language. This was heralded (correctly, in a narrow technical sense) as a great democratization: a notoriously Byzantine skillset had been suddenly made available to vastly more people. A capacity once reserved for a priesthood of specialists, a relatively small society of craftsmen, has been distributed suddenly and nearly for free to baristas, accountants, fourteen-year-olds, retirees, you, me … We have been told that the instruments now available to the general public are staggeringly powerful. The era of citizen coding is upon us! A reasonable person, informed of this, would have braced for the consequences. Surely something would have to change, right? A wave of brilliant new apps? A flowering of new affordances granted by software? Any visible change to daily life commensurate with the scale of the gift of vibe coding? All of the above, no doubt. All of the above and more.
Well, take a look around and tell me … where is it? What are the fruits of all of this vibe coding? What difference has it made? What is the great application that has emerged from all this liberated capacity? What new thing does our species now do with its hours that it did not do three years ago? What old thing does our species not have to do that it had to do three years ago? What chores have been eliminated, what friction has been smoothed over, what corner of ordinary existence been reshaped by the sudden arrival of hundreds of millions of amateur programmers? There’s been a great deal of activity, some of it quite frantic. There’s been a steady churn of half-built to-do apps and Wordle clones and boutique email clients that do nothing the old standbys can’t, weekend RPG projects that flare and vanish, and at the end of it, there’s a world essentially unchanged. And to give the teams at Anthropic and OpenAI their flowers, this has not been a failure of their tools. The tools work, more or less. This is all about something stranger and more important than a failure of the LLMs: the necessary work of software has already been done. We haven’t seen a lot of new types of software because we already have what we need. You can’t flood a vessel that’s already full, and the amateurs, God bless them, have been pouring this new power into a jug that we’ve been frantically filling throughout the 21st century.
The project of software is complete. Not decelerating, not maturing, not entering some new and humbler phase, but complete. Complete in the way that the map of the Earth is complete, which is to say complete in the sense that the great blank spaces have been filled and what remains is the labeling of tributaries and the correcting of coastlines, mapping and remapping the parts of the globe that are in a state of permanent flux, responding to changing conditions without altering our conception of the Earth. I’m aware of how this all sounds. In particular, I’m not naive to the fact that for those who write code for a living (whose number is growing, not shrinking, despite doomsaying) it’s going to sound provoking rather than provocative. I’m also aware that some are going to mistake my saying that the project of software is complete for somehow belittling the achievements of software. This is not the case! I assure you that I’m aware that I’m typing my argument into a machine that would have been indistinguishable from sorcery to my grandparents and then transmitting it through a lattice of code so vast and so intricate that no living person could comprehend more than a sliver of it. I am aware that software enables my current economic existence, however ambivalent I have become about that relationship. No, I’m not claiming that the global project of satisfying humanity’s appetite for software is in any sense unimportant. I am however claiming that it’s finished. It has been accomplished.
Update: Corrected a boneheaded typo.
