The Vibes Are Off
In the grand scheme of things, our actions don't matter. The sun will keep rising in the east, the Earth will keep revolving around it, our solar system will continue to move around space and time, and this here space rock we inhabit will continue to chug along. Until it won't. And, after a while, nothing else will. This is a universe that respects the rule of law, especially the second one of thermodynamics.
Most of us will live our lives in obscurity, not doing anything noteworthy, and we'll be forgotten within a couple of generations. Even people who keep popping up in your social media feeds right now will be forgotten in a few decades or so. This is not a sad fact, or dark thought. It just shows that we may be inconsequential individually, but our collective actions are extremely meaningful. It's humbling to realize that we are part of something greater than the sum of our individual selves. It teaches us that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to every single person who came before us. Your direct ancestors, sure. But also everyone else.
The way you think. The things you eat. The language you speak. The technology you use to make your life easier. The stories we tell. The art that inspires us. The things we celebrate. Our rituals. Those are all debts that we owe to our predecessors. And we cannot pay that debt. Not directly. We pay it forward. Our payment plan is simple: leave things in a better state than when you found them. And we are not doing that. Quite the opposite, really. We've been making things harder and harder for the ones who will replace us. This is not some earth-shattering realization, but it's good to remember that we do know how to make navigating life a little easier. We know that in certain parts of the world, once upon a time, a blue-collar job could support a family of five. But, then...Well, you know all that.
We were conditioned to forget that we owe that debt. We were conditioned to believe that everything is a zero-sum game. In order for me to thrive, you have to suffer. For me to accumulate wealth, you need to be exploited. We see this every day. And it's not true. The people doing this conditioning are the only ones benefiting from it. No one else. But, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. You cannot stop entropy.
It doesn't mean it's not fucked up, though. Because it very much is. I gotta come clean here and tell you that everything you read so far was not planned at all. I didn't set out to write any of this, but I try to let my writing go where it wants. I am terrible at planning. The actual subject is much more mundane.
What I did set out to write is about this. It kinda ties into the long preamble in the sense that one dumbass "vibe coding" a product that he wants people to pay for doesn't really matter in itself. But it paints a broader picture of the state of this particular branch of technology, and how fucked up our conditioning has become.
The underlying message here is clear: this "developer" wants to make something out of nothing. This individual wants to, specifically, make money without doing the work. Which is, of course, what the people conditioning us to think this way do, but they do it in a much larger scale. However, as the second law of thermodynamics tells us, you can't make something out of nothing: work needs to be done somewhere, somehow. In this case, the work was done by, well, our predecessors. The LLMs powering Cursor were trained in our collective knowledge, using energy other people generated, powered by technology invented by others, on top of research made by others, probably funded by the public. A lot of things needed to happen before this particular individual could do his "vibe coding." It's a core tenet of capitalism: externalize the costs, internalize the profits. Without this, capitalism doesn't work. And this is not a judgment of value or anything like that, just the reality.
So, all this work has been done by other people in the background, all these resources used, all this brainpower deployed so one dumbass can make a "SaaS" piece of shit product that got popped within 5 seconds by people with nothing but an internet connection, a browser, and a terminal window? No artificial intelligence can fix your natural stupidity, hubris, and greed.
The good news here is that the absolute majority of "code" or "products" being vomited by dumb people using code auto-complete is irrelevant. Nothing of consequence is being done this way. So far. I wouldn't count on some idiot executive of a stupid—yet critical—enterprise to listen to some stupid and evil McKinsey management consultant and say "I don't think that's a good idea." Mainly because the whole point of giving McKinsey millions of dollars in the first place is to let them do the thinking for you.
Imagine "vibe coded" air traffic control systems. Or industrial control systems. Or financial systems. Or software driving medical devices. Or an airliner FADEC. Or literally anything that matters? You know, the kind of thing that's not on Hacker News show and tell. That shit can blow up all day long and no one will get hurt. But it does set a really bad precedent because some idiot in charge of something consequential will absolutely try to get something out of "nothing" like this. Fuck paying the debt forward. Just roll it over and let it accrue interest until it's someone else's problem.
Luckily, we have people in our industry that do take this shit seriously. I'm not talking about some CISSP, CEH LinkedIn dumbass. This industry of ours came to be because some folks looked at those corporate behemoths and thought: "They are big and powerful, but they're dumb. Let me solo this." That did bring about some change, but we're sliding right back into the "what can possibly go wrong?" mindset that allowed the early phreakers and hackers to flourish. People who understand how things work, what the consequences of being stupid are, and how things should be will always be around to humble some average HN poster or some mega corporation. People who are not proud of their own ignorance.
A lot of people came to this field for the wrong reasons, thinking it would be easy money. It's not. They will leave as soon as something else looks easier. If you look closely, they already are. If you stick around—and I hope you do, because we need all the help we can get—learn your craft. Build upon the works of the ones who came before you. This field has a long tradition of making the powerful look stupid, and we need to keep that tradition going. Pay that debt forward. This really doesn't work without all of us.
P.S.: We have a very cool Discord server where we talk about this kind of thing. And stickers. And music. And we do a lot of talking about hockey for some reason. And we have pictures of pets. It's nice. Come hang out.
- Previous: 20% of Zero is Zero