Fediverse & AI Coding Tools & Vibe Coding

[julian@activitypub.space]

@uwehalfhand@norcal.social I feel we're conflating vibe coding with plain AI usage as an assistant.

There's absolutely no pedagogical value to vibe coding.

cc @fedicat@pc.cafe @reiver@mastodon.social

[liaizon@social.wake.st]

@julian I can say as someone who has learned quite a lot about a bunch of super technical topics from doing some exploration of vibe coding that I completely disagree with this sentiment. I think the companies and ways the AI industry is operating is horrid and abysmal but those two things shouldn't be conflated.

[julian@activitypub.space]

@liaizon@social.wake.st what do you define vibe coding as?

Vibe coding is prompting, followed by copy-paste, and then re-prompting with the error message, repeat.

In no step there is any critical thinking.

If you are inspecting the generated code, applying it judiciously, and asking questions back to further understand the decisions made, you are not vibe coding.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@julian @reiver @fedicat @johannab

Yes, I've tried AI as a brainstorming assistant, and if you keep a keen eye on the conversation it works great. And there are many other good uses too.

But I feel that the net effect of AI on the fabric of our society will be quite negative, making regular people overly reliant on exploitative technology they do not own.

Huge AI bubble or not, it may be a passed station, and AI here to stay. Tech comes 1st, technology progress decoupled from human progress.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@julian @reiver @fedicat @johannab

> The problem is that some people use AI as a shortcut to no longer think.

The issue is bigger than that, I think. One needs expertise to work with AI responsibly, and recognize where it goes off the rails. In our own expert areas we invested the time to be able to correct AI output.

In all other areas, where we'll have to use hastily-introduced AI, we too are unable to detect its flaws. While AI poses as expert on anything, and is integrated everywhere.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@julian @reiver @fedicat @johannab

Furthermore I guess the killer app for AI is "Autoritarianism". Allow a small group of bad actors to control entire populations, by letting AI wade through the wealth of information collected via surveillance capitalism, weeding out patterns of resistance well before it becomes any serious threat. And a dictator doesn't care about that 5% error margin, where the AI got it wrong.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@julian @reiver @fedicat @johannab

Need only look at Palantir porting the operations of the US government to AI systems, and similar corporations (entire supply lines), to see this worrying trend.

[tchambers@indieweb.social]

@reiver @dansup
We should embrace any tools that respect creators privacy and produce safe code and that can enable new creative “minimal viable products” apps to ship even if they are likely to need to mature using more traditional programming later.

[khzimmer2@literatur.social]

@reiver
Your poll is biased.

You're asking people to explain why they do NOT want to use such (immoral and energy-intensive) tools.

But you're NOT asking for reasons why people WANT to use such (immoral and energy-intensive) tools.

Nice try! 😎

#no2ai

[oddpixel@mas.to]

@reiver nope. I have been cleaning up sloppy "vibe coding" for a month straight on a contract. Security, scalability, and code clarity are impacted by this approach.

[thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange]

Thanks, I hadn't read that ... but I wasn't thinking about any one particular incident, I've heard similar things from a lot of people.

I know where I am on this, but still curious to see the results of the poll!

@onepict