Vibing With AI: The New Technology Wave (Bubble Might Come First).

The New Technology Wave Is Here To Stay! Will Be A Mainstay. Like The Cloud and The Mobile Internet Technology Waves Which Came Before It. But The Bubble May Be Temporary.

(Re)Creating The Shortest-Path Algorithm With Gemini AI. Why?

This Foundational Algorithm Is Widely Used For Finding Shortest Routes in Google Maps, Routing Info (via Data Packets) Throughout The Whole Global Internet, Delivery Logistics, And Etc.

Vibe Coding Is Expressing Your Prompt Intents And Let AI Code The Rest. It’s Tapping Into AI For The Grunt Work or Heavy Lifting. Vibing With AI Is Bouncing Back-n-Forth Interacting With AI To Generate and Refine Code For Your App Idea.

It Just Took Me An Hour-and-Half To Generate A Simple Test Html/Css/Javascript Website To Recreate Dijkstra’s Shortest-Path Algorithm. Along With The UI Animation To Show For It.

https://borrow2share.github.io/DijkstrasAlgorithm/

I Was A Clumsy Code Writer Back In The University Days. Still Is. That’s Why I Don’t Code As My Main Forte! So Back Then, It Took Me A Few Days To Do It In The C++ Language (Albeit A Bad Algo) And With No Graphical UI To Show For It.

I Believe Dijkstra’s Algorithm Code And All The Other Vast Codebases Out There Have Been “Implanted” Into The AI Training. I Don’t Believe AI Can Do What Human Ingenuity Can. Maybe After Showing/Training It.

So, We Are Tapping Into The Hundreds of Billions of Code Lines That Have Ever Been Written By The Hundreds Of Thousands Of Professional Coders Out There. Yes, For The Rusty Clumsy ‘Coders’ Like Me Who Knows Several Programming Languages. Lol.

Although AI Will Write Most Of The Code, It Is Important To Skim (Even Actually Read) The Lines Of Code To Look For Any Security Issues/Vulnerabilities! Or, Do Some Sort Of Secure Code Scan Over The Lines.

Here Are Some Insightful Reviews From Software Engineers Who Have Let AI Generate Code For Them To Approve And Implement:

(Ref: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-writes-almost-all-code-what )

Over the past few weeks, some experienced software engineers have shared personal “a-ha” moments about how AI tooling has become good enough to use for generating most of the code they write.

Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, was very impressed by how far Claude Code has come:

“I’m not joking and this isn’t funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned, etc. I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

It’s not perfect and I’m iterating on it, but this is where we are right now. If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain you are already an expert in. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts”.

Thorsten Ball, software engineer at Amp reflected (emphasis mine):

“For more than 15 years, I thought I loved writing code, loved typing out code by hand, and loved the “cadence of typing”, as Gary Bernhardt once called it; sitting in front of my editor with my fingers click-clacking on my keyboard.

Now, I’m not so sure.

2025 was the year in which I deeply reconsidered my relationship to programming. In previous years, I had the occasional “should I become a Lisp guy?”, for sure; but not the question “do I even like typing out code?”

What I learned over the course of the year is that typing out code by hand now frustrates me”.

Malte Ubl, CTO at Vercel:

“It’s been a crazy holiday period: I built 2 major open-source projects (one unreleased, and the other a full implementation of a bash environment in TypeScript for use by AI agents).

I started writing a book

I fixed a bunch of other things

It’s a very different world now that we’re in Opus 4.5 world, and these would absolutely not have been possible without it. Opus + Claude Code now behaves like a senior software engineer whom you can just tell what to do, and it’ll do it. Supervision is still needed for difficult tasks, but it is extremely responsive to feedback and then gets it right.

I don’t want to be too dramatic, but y’all have to throw away your priors. The cost of software production is trending towards zero”.

Longtime readers may recall Malte from his reflections on 20 years in software engineering, including 11 at Google.

One could claim that the voices above have an interest in this topic given they work at companies selling AI dev tools. But engineers with no pull towards any vendor also made similar observations:

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, described how his stance on AI has flipped due to the improved models:

“You can’t let the slop and cringe deny you the wonder of AI. This is the most exciting thing we’ve made computers do since we connected them to the internet. If you spent 2025 being pessimistic or skeptical about AI, why not start 2026 with optimism and curiosity?

Just last summer, I spoke with Lex Fridman about not letting AI write any code directly, but it turns out part of this resistance was simply based on the models not being good enough at the time! I spent more time rewriting what it wrote, than if I’d done it from scratch. That has now flipped.”

Adam Wathan, creator of Tailwind CSS, reflected:

“Any time I have to type precise syntax by hand now [instead of using AI] feels like such a tedious chore. Surprisingly and thankfully, programming is still fun, probably more fun [with LLMs].

My biggest problem now is coming up with enough worthwhile ideas to fully leverage the productivity boost.”

From “AI slop” to rocking the industry

One widely circulated “a-ha” moment has been from Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI. Andrej has not been involved in OpenAI for years, and is known to be candid in his assessment and critique of AI tools. Last October, he summarized AI coding tools as overhyped on the Dwarkesh podcast (emphasis mine):

“Overall, the models are not there. I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not.

It’s slop.

They’re not coming to terms with it, and maybe they’re trying to fundraise or something like that. I’m not sure what’s going on, but we’re at this intermediate stage. The models are amazing. They still need a lot of work.

For now, autocomplete is my sweet spot. But sometimes, for some types of code, I will go to an LLM agent”.

Two months on, that view had been thoroughly revised, with Karpathy writing on 26 December (emphasis mine:)

“I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer.

The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year, and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue.

There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master in addition to the usual layers involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering.

Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around, except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold and operate it while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession.

Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind”.

The creator of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, responded, sharing that all of his committed contributions last month were AI-written:

“The last month was my first as an engineer when I didn’t open an IDE at all. Opus 4.5 wrote around 200 PRs, every single line. Software engineering is radically changing, and the hardest part even for early adopters and practitioners like us is to continue to re-adjust our expectations. And this is *still* just the beginning”.