What Is It and Isn’t?
In the absence of numerical evidence, marketing defaults to experiential language when selling a process or idea.
AI is so smart it can translate “vibes” into fully fledged lines of code.
The advertised value of AI is shifting away from the quantitative boon of explosive productivity to the qualitative swoon of its effect upon us. That isn’t to say pair programming with an AI assistant isn’t useful or even powerful. This entire site was built using Grok as a means to accelerating production, but it wasn’t a transcendent experience.
The reality of the matter is far closer to this:
In [Andrej] Karpathy’s telling, “vibe coding” means he can “just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
In building this site, that was my exact experience: AI mostly worked.
Digital Dialect
The effect that AI as a tool has upon its wielder should not be underestimated. It will change the way we make sense of the world around us in the same way that the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the language you speak shapes the nuance of how you understand your environment.
AI is the next layer in the strata of computer languages as they transition from the incomprehensibility of binary to the human-readability of natural-language syntax—for example, from machine language, a low-level language, to JavaScript, a high-level language. That is, one language sitting on top of another in order to simplify and expedite code creation by a human programmer. In more technical terms, this is known as “language implementation.” For example, the implementation language of PHP is C.
But I digress.
This dogpiling of prebuilt programming solutions (i.e. objects, methods, etc.) will continue until the vector of influence changes and human language starts conforming to the idiosyncrasies of AI prompt-driven linguistics. Or simply put, artificial intelligence will eventually change human languages as much as we have changed computer languages.
