A Thought Of Our Own

Vibe coding, slopsquatting, prompt poisoning... No, I'm not talking about the latest Neal Stephenson novel; it's just another day in this age of AI. "Latent walking", or "model collapse", I can easily see this as the start of a great novel indeed -- or as the start of humanity's eventual downfall.

You hear a lot of pros and cons of generative AI flying around. There’s the fear of people outsourcing their knowledge to AI, becoming even more dependent on big tech from across the pond. And on the other hand there’s the stories of people picking up programming (or any other topic) for the first time with the help of AI. People finding solace in chatting with AI; or companionship; or help with, for instance, battling their addiction. Imagine, if AI would be able to save even one single human life, wouldn’t all the money and resources it has required to build it be worth it – at least for that person’s loved ones?

But let’s talk about the tech I work with every day. Yes, I use AI to help out with coding sometimes. Yes, I’ve experimented with vibe coding and learned a lot about a new (for me) framework in doing so. But I wonder. The libraries and frameworks we use every day, things like Spring, or JUnit, or Angular, to name some random examples… They all emerged from original thought, from moments when someone saw the need for something entirely new. There might not have been anything like it before.

Now take generative AI, whose knowledge is, let’s say, limited to whatever was available when it was trained. If we would at some point outsource all our coding to AI, can we still expect truly “original” libraries or frameworks to emerge? If AI existed 25 years ago, would Spring or JUnit or Angular ever have seen the light of day?

You might say (as Claude did when I asked it) that it’s still people who craft the prompts for AI to do the coding. People that feel the need to do things in a better way than before, coming up with an idea for a new framework (which has been the driver for many of these products). A framework that they can develop so much faster with the help of AI.

But will they? Will they feel the need to do things in a better way? Because AI and vibe coding won’t become any faster with a new framework or library. And more importantly, how will they be able to tell what’s a better way, if they don’t even understand how the code works anymore? If the art of programming has been fully replaced by the art of prompting?

Perhaps it’s the prompts that are poisoning us.