Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled

I know. As if what the world needed was yet another blogpost about LLMs and AI tech. Yet there is a pile of things which have been on my mind, and I haven't seen them laid out elsewhere in the way I'm going to write them, and so here we go.

I still don't use genAI to write my articles, fwiw. Here or anywhere else. These rambly words are my own.

The tower tilts

I readThe Tower Keeps Rising recently, and it has stuck in my mind.

The piece is an observation, andaccording to Armin on lobste.rs, it is not an advocacy for the state of affairs (though by running a vibecoding company, Armin is part of advancing this direction):

For context: I'm the author. I intentionally did not make a judgement if this is a good or bad thing, or if this is going to continue working. It's primarily an observation that with agents you can continue to make progress even when people on the team maneuvered themselves into situations where previously they would have needed to talk to each other.

The summary of Armin's post is effectively that vibecoded systems keep piling code on top of code, but in many systems things seem to keep building, but the abstractions keep piling on, but eventually no human can understand the codebase. But this is a new way of operating, because LLMs can "explain" a part of the codebase that no human can make sense of, and so continue building.

Even if such systems continue to work, I find two things: 1) that now advocates for this state of affairs have pivoted into acknowledging that this is the end state of their systems and 2) they seem to be accepting it as the way forward.

Regarding the first, I think it's very important to note that this is a shift.Simon Willison, probably the best pro-genAI writer on the internet (sometimes, I think, giving cover for a lot of weaker writers, but is that Simon's fault?), at one point coined the term"agentic engineering" and was very clear todraw a line in the sand between agentic engineering and vibecoding:

We al…