The argument is that if you intent to maintain the code you should keep the AI on a very tight leash, and at least understand the architecture of the code, if not every line.
This is good advice for any code contribution. Current AI is definitely not better than the best programmers, but is often better than junior programmers (who often carry a "senior" title now).
Vibe coding is allowing everyone (including me!) to make way more apps in my personal life that are very throwaway. I think some folks are doing this in business contexts too. But this is a real game-changer for non-technical folks
Unfortunately this is common, especially if something is dev facing.
Whenever I have to talk to devs from card processors, video services, etc. They seem more
confused that their app is broken than anything else.
Yeah I definitely agree. I'm specifically talking about things you're not shipping or charging money for. Just little personal apps for you and friends or you and work colleagues. Internal tools, etc.
Fair! I agree that we want as little code as we can get away with. We love pull requests with a lot of red (deleted lines).
Like you say about libraries, it is possible to have code that isn't your problem. It's all about how leaky the abstraction is. Right now LLMs write terrible abstractions, and it's unclear how long it'll take for them to get good at writing good code.
I am excited to invest more in tools to make the understanding of code easier, cheaper, and more fun. My friend Glen pointed one way in this direction: https://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/
As Geoffrey Litt likes to say, LLMs can help with this by building us throwaway visualizers and debuggers to help us understand our code.
But we have plenty of tools that helps us understanding code. Things like inspectors (UI,network,..), tracing (including the old printf), debuggers (stack frame for function calls and variable values), grep (for context and overview) and static analysers.
I see people going all in with LLMs and forgetting that those even exists. It's hard to take such people seriously.
Strong agree! For example, we at Val Town just invested very heavily in getting a good ol' fashioned language server to work in our product to power hover-overs and type information in our web editor. That'll likely be our next company blog post...
I like LLM as a technology (just got trough a couple of courses on Machine learning this year). But when we have all these tools available, the next step is making a better UI for them (Kinda like IDEs do), not reinvent everything from scratch.
I'm spending an inordinate amount of time turning that video into an essay, but I feel like I'm being scooped already, so here's my current draft in case anyone wants to get a sneak preview: https://valdottown--89ed76076a6544019f981f7d4397d736.web.val...
> My top choice for this kind of thing in 2025 is GitHub, using GitHub Pages. It's free for public repositories and I haven't seen GitHub break a working URL that they have hosted in the 17+ years since they first launched.
> A few years ago I'd have recommended Heroku on the basis that their free plan had stayed reliable for more than a decade, but Salesforce took that accumulated goodwill and incinerated it in 2022.
As someone building a new hosting provider with a free tier (https://val.town) it's so lovely to see folks like Simon value long-term stability. It makes it easier to make the business case to invest in it. At the end of the day, it's all about trust.
