- AI with Kyle
- Posts
- AI with Kyle Daily Update 123
What’s happening in the world of AI:
Highlights
🎻 Should We Hate Vibe Coders?
Had a video go viral yesterday. 200,000 views on Instagram, another 100,000 on TikTok. About vibe coding. And a lot of people are furious…
Based of this I spent yesterday’s Live talking about what vibe coding is and what impact it may have.
Before we get into what vibe coding is and how to do it, I want to share something from Alberta Tech's Substack that I think is the most beautiful and honest explanation I've ever seen of why programmers are upset.
Imagine you have been training your entire life to be a violinist. Every day you show up to rehearsal with a group of people who all had to pass 5 rounds of interviews - er, auditions - to join the orchestra. Then one day, 700 people walk in off the street into your rehearsal and claim they’re vibe violinists. They break instruments, they sound horrible, they clutter up your Twitter feed with recordings of their “work.”
You and your real violinist friends laugh and trade stories of how these people don’t know the difference between the tailpiece and the fingerboard.
But then one day, not that many days later, something terrifying happens. You hear a beautiful tune, and turn around to find a vibe violinist playing it.
And certainly, you think to yourself, that shouldn’t be possible without a foundational music education. That shouldn’t be possible when they’re not even holding a violin the right way. You listen a while longer until in a blink, they falter, they lose the melody.
And so you turn back to your real violinist friends and you laugh at how these nincompoops thought they could play just like real violinists. You laugh and you laugh and all the while you feel a tingle of anxiety along your scalp.
…
It's a really fucking scary time to be a developer. Whether vibe coders start applying for developer roles or AI automates those roles altogether, vibe coders are the embodiment of the end of traditional coding careers. And it's quite normal to hate the person trying to take your job.
I highly recommend reading the full piece.
🔧 What Vibe Coding Actually Is
The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, one of the co-creators of ChatGPT, about a year ago. His original post:
"There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like 'decrease the padding on the sidebar by half' because I'm too lazy to find it. I accept all, always. I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages, I just copy paste them in with no comment. Usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension. Sometimes the LLM can't fix a bug so I just work around it and ask for random changes until it goes away."
This is not some random guy. This is one of the best programmers on earth, and he just vibes with AI to build software.
The difference between vibe coding and AI-assisted coding is control. AI-assisted coding means you're still driving - you understand what's happening, you're using AI to autocomplete and speed things up. Vibe coding is basically Jesus take the wheel, look ma no hands. It’s about the “vibes”.
Source: Original Karpathy tweet
📉 The Goalpost Keeps Moving
What’s causing concern is that just vibing is getting better. And better. And better;
There's this brilliant tweet from Aaron Francis showing the progression and where we are now:
Every year we retreat to a new position. Every year that position falls. The AI gets better. Betting against it getting better is not a good bet.
Ethan Mollick said this years ago and it's still true: "Remember, today's AI is the worst AI you will ever use." The writing will improve. The context window will improve. The costs will drop. Whatever AI can't do today, wait six months…
This “oh no” is where we are right now. And it’s why coders around the world are (very rightly) scared, angry and fighting.
🚀 Why This Matters If You're Not a Coder
OK all well and good. But if you aren’t a coder why the hell should you care?
Coding is the canary in the coal mine.
It's getting disrupted first because the people building AI are coders - they know that domain. But as soon as they start working with healthcare professionals, legal teams, accountants, we'll see similar patterns in those industries. They’ve just started in code because that’s their area. And it happens to be a very lucrative area to crack too!
If you're a coder in a job? A 9-5. This is going to be rough. Junior roles are getting wiped out. The path to senior is narrowing. There’s no way around this: the future of coding as a profession is going to be very different. Probably for the worst.
For entrepreneurs though, this is massive. Previously, every startup event I went to had people saying "I've got a billion dollar idea, I just need to find a CTO" or "I just need to learn Python." That excuse is gone. You can go from idea to working MVP in an hour using tools like Lovable.
If you're entrepreneurial and have ideas, you can no longer hide behind the technical excuse. You can build it now. Sure… very quickly you'll realise your idea might not be worth as much as you thought - because building and marketing and getting it to customers, that's the hard part! But at least you’ve got to that next step!
🛠️ How to Get Started
Three paths depending on your comfort level:
Lovable - Best for complete beginners. Looks like ChatGPT. Just describe what you want. Lowest learning curve but also least “powerful”.
Cursor - Middle ground. A legit code editor but with AI built in. Good if you want to understand what's happening.
Claude Code - The most powerful option. Steeper learning curve. You'll need the terminal which terrifies non-coders. But if you have any coding background, this is the no-brainer choice. Costs $100-200/month for the Max plan (realistically necessary - the $20 plan hits limits fast).
Member Question: "I coded for 20 years, haven't for 10. What's the best choice for me?"
Kyle's response: Claude Code, absolutely. Because you know code, things like the command line interface won't scare you. That's the massive problem for non-coders - when they see the Claude Code front page telling them to use curl commands and create folders, it's absolutely terrifying. But with 20 years of experience? You'll be fine. You'll pick it up quickly and it's just more powerful than the alternatives.
Member Question: "We have a new role to monitor the vibe coders."
Kyle's response: Yeah, this is what Alberta Tech talks about. Coders become orchestrators - managing AI agents instead of managing a team. But the big question is: do we need as many orchestrators as we had coders? If one orchestrator can work with 10-20 agents, companies will hire fewer humans.
The counterargument is "we'll hire the same people but produce 10x more" - but that relies on demand growing to match supply. When your customers can build their own software in an afternoon, when competitors can recreate your SaaS overnight... I don't think demand will keep up.
Want the full unfiltered discussion? Join me tomorrow for the daily AI news live stream where we dig into the stories and you can ask questions directly.