Track Changes

“I don’t know how you have time to text your mates,” says the balding man to his fiancé on the train to London Bridge.

“I don’t spend any time texting ChatGPT,” she replies without looking up from her phone.

“Vibe Coding” is a phase. It will pass, so these things go. But underneath it is a real movement. More akin to a DIY hobby or transistor radio tribes of the past.

I’ve seen a lot of chat on X about how vibe-coded apps are rubbish when deployed to production. And when someone has tried to replace their stack with a vibe-code alternative, the results are often a disaster.

I don’t buy the idea software developers will be out of jobs because of AI tools. Even with my limited programming ability, it seems obvious you need to understand data structures, basic programming, and how things should work to get the most out of Cursor. Otherwise it is the blind leading the blind.

I’ve only spent a couple of weekends playing around with Cursor. But the agent setting has a horrible habit of inventing packages and frameworks it thinks you need. And if you didn’t know anything about programming, you would believe it.

As Craig Mod points out, tools like Claude Code and Cursor are hobby project tools. You can build a search engine for your site, HTML templates, markdown convertors, and other silly little software projects. And not be worried about building for scale or other VC-problems.

These tools are built for the individual, not for scale.

Required Caveat: There are many moral and ethical issues with using LLMs, but building software feels like a) one of the few truly ethically “clean”(er) uses (trained on open source code, etc.), and b) maybe the thing LLMs most excel at (science, medicine, and code seems to be their wheelhouse in terms of energy-in to manifold-value-out).