Let the kids vibe

Positive reflections on the fear uncertainty and doubt surrounding "vibecoding".

You know vibe-coding has been the talk of the town recently. Opinions all over, it's great, it's terrible, engineering is dead, it's revolutionised, it's killing our ability to think, it's democratising software, it's risking critical infrastructure and security.

History repeats itself though, and I've seen this before and if you look carefully, you have too.

In music, there was this idea of a "bedroom producer". A kid who doesn't have access to a million dollar recording studio, a Nord Stage keyboard, a set of ATC studio monitors, a mixing table the size of a rich family's kitchen counter tops. No, they cracked FL Studio, pirated their VSTs, produced tracks that clipped, distorted, mixed "badly", had muddy lows and tinny highs but nobody cared because the ones that produced soulful connecting music succeeded because they just vibed.

Making things with code is part engineering and part art, and a good chunk of “software engineers” are creatives at heart. Creativity requires failure and experimentation, this new wave of creative-coding through language models enables a kind of flow that was previously not possible. Sure you’re going to introduce bugs and security flaws and you’re not going to understand anything it spits out, but the curious ones, the ones who want to understand and better their craft will use this as a launch pad into a new creative endeavour. And maybe one day those folks will get their big break with their million dollar recording studio.

So let the bedroom producers create, let the vibe coders vibe code.