So over the last week I’ve been subjected to multiple uses of the term “vibe coding”. Now back here under the rock that I live, that term struck me as rather peculiar so I queued up some videos to watch and took a tour of the idea this morning. Now now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be just another anti-AI rant. We’ve had our fill of that, right? No instead we are going to focus on the flaws of the Venture Capitalist class, courtesy of the people running Y-Combinator.
Why them? Well it’s because they made this video which happens to be the first one I watched on the topic. I was going to watch a video in which Primeagen reacts to this video as that is what my friend sent to me but decided to just watch the source video instead as I didn’t want to waste the additional time listening to Prime to bash it (though make no mistake, Prime is awesome). As you may have noticed, I’m quite capable of doing that myself.
Hell I’m not even going to go into specifics here. Because the idea behind this is so ridiculously stupid that I just can’t be bothered to give it enough credit to waste that kind of time on it. However the 1000ft summary of the idea is this: Vibe coding is essentially a hipster name for so-called software engineers (or as the Y-Combinator staff likes to refer to them “product engineers”) who basically prompt coding AIs and mindlessly toss whatever crap it produces into the mix. Now to be fair by mindlessly I don’t mean just dumping the first round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it. No instead what I mean is dumping the third or fourth round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it.
See? I can be kind.
The issue that I want to tackle today isn’t AI, which is basically a scam which preys upon vulnerabilities in our shared model of perception (insofar as LLMs are concerned anyway), but rather the cancer of brain rot that has spread throughout the VC community. These people aren’t interested in solving problems or enhancing the lives of people. They aren’t interested in plugging away until they discover and can finance the next world changing idea. No what they want is actually to find somebody that can build up just enough of a business around just enough of an idea (whether its good or not is not particularly relevant) that they will be able to sell their stake for more than they initially invested into it.
That is literally all these people care about. They are detached not only from the human condition that the rest of us have to grapple with, but are utterly divorced from the consequences of the fads and the garbage they unleash upon the world (note: I am speaking about VCs in general, not Y-Combinator specifically). They are the people who decided that being rich wasn’t enough. No instead they wanted to be filthy fucking rich. How does one define filthy fucking rich? I have no idea. It has no boundary. It has no goal line. It has no conclusion. It is a journey without a destination.
That’s because it is basically a name attached to an deep desire for more that can never truly be fulfilled. It’s why Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and every other billionaire on the planet can’t help themselves. If a few million wasn’t enough, why would a hundred million be enough? Why would a billion? Hell why would even a trillion dollars be enough? They are the capitalist equivalent to the old school nerd in the 80s that spent all of their time in the arcade trying to beat their own high score on the Pac-Man machine. No amount of victory can ever sate them. They are broken on some deep and fundamental level and their daily rituals serve only to inform observers of that fact.
Of course the believers in capitalism will tell you that these people should be worshipped and venerated at the highest levels. They will tell you that these people above all others represent the pinnacle of what we should all aspire to be. I personally find this to be deeply disturbing as it’s essentially a tacit admission that our damaged system has put a group of very damaged people on a pedestal which inherently leaves the rest of us feeling at odds. This is by design.
And what about the rest of us? What are we doing? Well I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I’m currently trying to find some semblance of balance in my existence. While I stopped doing side work and I have begun to accept the fact that my time in the tech industry is coming to a close, I’m still battling the demons that come with 25 years of being a card carrying member of this cult. One of the biggest problems I had with the industry is that I was only allowed to produce what I considered to be “80 percent” solutions to problems. The idea being that once you solved 80% of the core problem, the other 20% generally wasn’t worth the time or money required to tackle it, so we would move on. Deep down I HATED this. I wanted to solve 100% of these problems so much of the time. However now that I have the time to try to “100 percent” my own problems, I’ve started to come to a chilling realization.
For example yesterday I was going to sit down and play a video game on my Steam Console but it ended up taking me over an hour to get around to that because I noticed that the wifi performance on the console wasn’t quite up to par. So I went crazy on my wifi setup and started reassigning different APs to different roles / channels and different clients to different networks in an effort to improve the situation. Never mind that the original problem wasn’t really a problem at all. The wireless worked. It just was a little slower than I might’ve liked it to be for downloading updates.
Yet this deep desire to optimize everything cost me an hour of reckless abandonment with a game that I strongly suggest nobody play because like so many rogue-likes, it’s devouring my life. Putting that aside for a moment, even after I finally got around to playing the game, I was already in a bad mood because of the wifi situation and my limited success in “resolving” it, so I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I might have otherwise.
Much like the Y-Combinator VCs, I was missing the point. But at least I’ve made a little progress because I’m conscious of that fact now. I’m trying to start letting some things go because otherwise there will be no room for joy left in my life. Sometimes things are good enough. Sometimes they aren’t. Knowing the difference can be insanely challenging at times though. I still believe that “80 percent” is a cop out… but instead of going for 100, I think I’m going to start settling for “90 percent”. That feels close enough. At least when it comes to my own personal affairs.
So what is the point? The point is to produce systems, software and hardware that act as a force multiplier for people. That’s it. In my example, decent wifi is just as much as a force multiplier for my Steam console as perfect wifi (which I can assure you absolutely does not exist) and yet requires far less effort and produces far less aggravation. The same goes for the VCs. Vibe Coding isn’t producing good shit. It’s producing bad shit. It’s producing shit that isn’t going to be maintainable or consistent. Everything that comes out of that process will be tossed into the bin within relatively short order. But if you are a VC, you don’t care. If the investment was worth it, you will have already sold it off to some bigger fish with deeper pockets who isn’t quite as qualified when it comes to telling whether or not its bullshit.
Imagine if traditional engineers built bridges with that mindset. Anybody living near a major waterway that had to cross it would either tragically die or spend a fortune paying for ferries ;)
But with that in mind I am trying to grapple with facing a future in which I have to curtail this tendency to over optimize. Today I can smile knowing that even though it took a few decades too long, I’m on a path to a saner head space. Yeah I’m going to take some detours and fuck it up along the way, but ultimately as long as I’m making forward progress, I’m doing okay. That’s a reason why I like to fix end user reported bugs at work. The idea that I made at least one thing better for an actual user at least once or twice a week brings a smile to my face. Even if everything else falls flat on its face, I made a tiny bit of life better for somebody out there.
I wish the VCs would spend less time trying to exploit the broken system of capitalism and more time trying to find and champion actually innovative ideas. You fuckers are already rich. There are bigger fish to fry. Humanity could actually benefit from your talents and resources. So go and do it already!