The Temptation of Vibe Coding

By this point I’ve written too much about my conflicted attitude toward generative AI. The TL;DR of it is that, in theory, “enhancement vs. replacement” is a way to determine whether a given use of generative AI is ethical or not: Asking Claude to write an Emacs function for me saves me a bit of time; asking it to write a research paper for me replaces work I, not the machine, should do, and more than likely perpetrates deception. So—at least in a vacuum, where we pretend we’re not concerned about the ethics of the madmen and fraudsters who run AI companies, or the way the training corpora of all major models were developed through rampant intellectual property theft—I’m not bothered by using either commercial code written with AI assistance, which is something I consider separate from “vibe coding”. Xcode’s context aware auto-complete, in which I’ve seen it correctly guess the next four cases in a switch statement based on filling out the first one, is a sound example of that (and…