Thoughts on the first section of Yegge's "Vibe Coding"

I'm reading Gene Kim and Steve Yegge's book "Vibe Coding":

When we say vibe coding, we mean that you have AI write your code—you’re no longer typing in code by hand (like a photographer going into a darkroom to manually develop their film). Although the most visible and glamorous part is code generation, AI helps with the whole software life cycle. AI becomes your partner in brainstorming architecture, researching solutions, implementing features, crafting tests, and hardening security. Vibe coding happens whenever you’re directing rather than typing, allowing AI to shoulder the implementation while you focus on vision and verification.

I've "vibe-coded" a few medium-small things, but they were enough to impress friends who were techie but not in the loop.

Still I am more or less persuaded that the future of dev will likely be Yegge's kitchen model: 

You’re the head (or executive) chef of the kitchen, and AI represents the army of chefs who help bring your vision to life. AI serves as your sous chef (your second in command) who understands your intentions, handles intricate preparations, and executes complex techniques with precision under your guidance. But AI is also your army of station chefs and cooks, specialists who help handle various technical details.

But it's not clear to me how individual devs should ramp up to that style of production if their current day job isn't there yet. 

So some thoughts after reading the first section of the book:

• The book spends a page talking about how complex web app construction has gotten, and how many things enterprise developers need to know - "package managers (npm, Yarn), bundlers (webpack, Rollup), transpilers (Babel), task runners (gulp, Grunt), testing frameworks, CSS preprocessors, build toolchains, deployment pipelines" and then says "Because of the DevOps philosophy of 'you build it, you run it,' you also need to learn Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, not to mention a whole host of AWS, GCP, or Azure services." That's definitely been true for my professional life, but I'm still shocked at how little of that I need for my side projects (and I laugh at how "Server Side Rendering" was the new hotness a few years ago, when older, simpler stacks never left that.) So when I try and get into a fuller vibe coding model, I have to decide if my monolithic, buildless, evergreen stack is still the best bet (and frankly AI understands it really well) or if I should use it as an excuse to add some buzzword bingo to my resume.
• As a side note, it's still startling how bad LLMs can be if they don't have access to the right subtools. I was feeling lazy (or experimental, at least) and asked both Claude and ChatGPT to do a simple "here's a big hero splash image for a porchfest site with an embedded date, please keep the image the same but update the date" task. ChatGPT choked on it, Claude got it in at a barely acceptable level, and I realized I should have just sucked it up and done it by hand. 
• There's such a cyberpunk feel to this moment, or at least the near future. A little hard to explain if you're not familiar with the genre, but like the decision to use a "corpo" LLM vs maybe a grungy LLM you have on your own hardware... or just everyone running around with their own bespoke software. It smells like mirrorshades.
• The book has a chapter of cautionary tales, examples of LLM going way off the rails, sometimes causing damage. I ran into one of those cases of LLM shortcutting when I vibecoded a CSV to address label PDF app - Claude was all too happy to keep using hardcoded test data for the actual print pages even after I had had it switch to live data for the setup and config pages. (I only had one set of data I cared about to test, so it took me a bit to notice)
• One thing the book is a little light on discussing frankly is costs. This stuff threatens to create a real divide between the have and the have nots. I have a couple buddies (both formerly involved in guitar bands, interestingly) where tech was the path out of poverty. It seems like that could be harder if the people who can afford $20-$200/month in AI helpers are the only ones who really learn to leverage helpers at scale.
• And of course there's the other lingering fear for developers... we have to hope that the people we report to now, the PMs and POs, don't find out we're not necessary - that running AI at scale will be enough of a skill that we still have value to add. 
• There can be such a religious fevor to both the AI-believers and the AI-rejectors. A while back I grabbed this passage from Jim Holt's "When Einstein Walked with Gödel": "[Richard Rorty] also liked to cite Nietzsche’s observation that truth is a surrogate for God. Asking of someone, “Does he love the truth?” Rorty said, is like asking, “Is he saved?”" 

At any rate, I know I do need to professionalize my side project world at least a bit - when you're dealing with a hoard of junior programmers you don't quite trust, testing, first rate source control, and deployment strategies can be more important than ever...

measuring code quality in an agentic world

My buddy Scott at Red Hat shared https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/02/10/besieged/ in the group chat.

It's a worthwhile summary of this point in development history.

Earlier I was appreciating the zeitgeist that maybe we were near the top of the S-shaped curve of what LLM could do, things might be settling down a bit. But recently I've been catching a different spin, that specifically the model releases last November really pointed to a new level of capability - something beyond the intuitions programmers experimenting with LLM the years before would have developed.  (The future might be the dev as head chef, with a bot sous chef bossing around a small hoard of underling agents.)

Scott mentioned Red Hat is pivoting to agentic workflow: "One interesting thing our CTO said was, we will not measure AI consumption, we will measure code coverage, quality, etc. Focus on outcomes."

Now, casting a blind eye to consumption reminds me of a tale from AOL/Millennial Media, when they thought pivoting to the cloud/AWS was giving them a bunch of dev and qa servers "too cheap to meter" - an expensive lesson they had to correct course around. And of course, there's the environmental impact (energy and water consumption - not to mention the "environment" of the crazy costs of GPUs and memory). And for all the democratization of code LLM offers, the idea that you must shell out month after month on a service (or buy some ridiculously priced hardware) in order to be competitive threatens to undermine the self-starting developer paradigm that got its start when home computers became cheap in the 80s.

But as I try to figure out how I can maintain my role as mediator between Business Folk and Machines I want to think about the second part of Scott's paraphrase, "code coverage, quality, etc"

Too often (in my heretical, anti-reductionist opinion) organizations go to quantify code coverage via unit tests percent coverage. But AI is going to require a new sense of what "quality" is:

* ability for future gens of your AI hoards to pick things up and iterate on earlier work

* consistent behaviors (externally testable)

* human-friendly UX (when applicable)

* edge cases covered

* one layer of AI check looking for weirdass shortcuts AI may have taken

* security, security, security

All of these have parallels in what traditional software development has to be keeping an eye on, but with humans being not as deeply embedded in the core loops, we will need more a more sophisticated way of quantifying how well things are going.

The AI Vampire

 My buddy Scott is a highup Project Manager at Red Hat. We hang out on a tiny group chat.

Scott has a huge experience with Open Source (and did some pioneering work in containerization) and is on board with the idea that AI is the future of development. He's really worried that the good guys get busy, overcome their inertia and reservations, and learn the arts of leveraging AI to make good stuff (with efficient token/energy use) and learning how to defend things from the bad guys, who never seem to have the same kind of compunctions about using any tool they can find.

He's fighting a war on two fronts; he yells at me for bringing up stuff from the AI-skeptic side, both from absolutists who will push back against AI tooth and nail, as well as from middle of the road developers who find utility in these "Jr Programmer Level of companions" but keep bumping their head into the limitations and confusion that results as context windows get filled up and what not, as well as some of the infamous AI gaffes making the rounds.

The other front is against executives who are too gung-ho about it all - who say "just build it" without acknowledging how the problem is no longer the coding - we now are in an age of surplus programming/build potential - but deciding what to build that will provide sustainable value, as well as socializing and building community around what gets built.

One of Scott's favorite articles is "The AI Vampire": 

Here were my takeaways:

* Yegge claims that a real corner was turned last November, in terms of what models like Claude Opus could do vs the earlier stuff. I'm currently nursing a theory that says, there might be a qualitative difference between those "$200/mo" models vs the "$20/mo" models that both the naysayers and the CEO types have been messing with, which has increased the skepticism in the first camp (as they run into limits) but with CEOs empowered enough to build cool stuff and not getting bothered by the MVP/prototype level of what they make. (I don't think Scott agrees with my analysis, but anyway) But Yegge says stuff like the long vaunted "10x Programmer" is now actually unlocked.

* Yegge points out that this AI-driven 10x mode is actually exhausting (hence the title of the piece) I'm guessing coding with AI takes a significant part of the fraction of doing it "by hand". It's a more concentrated set of demands and focus.

* and So we have a classic "where does the value go" situation. If the company tries to get 10x the work all the time, endless go-go-go mode, that's just a recipe for burnout. Conversely, if it's more like employees just put in 1/10 the effort, that's a plan to get swamped by competitors who are increasing their productivity. Yegge thinks its crucial we find a balance for the value capture.

And so I'm working but wondering what the rest of my career looks like - and where I am on the bellcurve of adoption...

watch them AI quotes

 I was really bummed to see journalist Benj Edwards got in trouble with AI fabricating quotes (he claims he was loopy with COVID and mistook paraphrases from one tool for actual quotes from another.)

I really enjoyed his previous work on computer history and retrogames - his occasional appearance on the podcast Retronauts, and I even bought a arcade stick for the Atari 2600 he was making as a side hustle.

Plus, this piece on "10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents" was right on - from the sheer fun of it, to the challenges when an AI reaches the end of its competency and familiarity...

&&

 Avoid unsafe "&&" Operator for Conditional Rendering in React and Next.js

Basically the TLDR is:
isVisible && <item />
to control visibility in React isn't great... edges cases of falsiness (like "NaN") may show up when you were hoping for a blank. So use the ternary operator with "null" as the false case instead.

On my team I pushed it a little further and asked if we could prefer 

isVisible ? <item /> : null;

over

isHidden ? null : <item />

admittedly the case the triggered me was like

isReadOnly || !featureFlagForItem ? null : <item />

which is kind of a tangle to read.

a good url scheme is a joy forever

Unsung heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme

I really do love a good URL scheme. The first time I was blown away by an elegant scheme was Jira, back around 2010 I think. They incorporated ticket numbers directly in the path, and I had a brief flicker of "wait, they can do that now?" (at that point, URL routers weren't ubiquitous, and URLs often had to be implemented as a physical file structure.) 

URLs remain such a powerful form of UI, even after the industry's pivot to "mobile (app) first". Even to this day, people always aren't in a hurry to download your company's app, and a lovely URL can be so expressive - so much kinder to humans than "robot throwup" QR codes.

(And don't get me started on ?fbclid privacy-breaking tracking nonsense; I wouldn't be QUITE so resentful if they weren't so long and winding - no GUID needs to be that long.) 

a shinier net

So, scammers are using AI to make high-grade, legit looking sites. 

Most likely this is a ruse (with fake books and authors) to sucker would-be authors in to pay for "Resources for Writers" etc, or to just harvest contacts.

As KJ Charles puts it:

"I've just realized. Banks used to be big imposing high street buildings because it gave people confidence they had money and weren't fly by night. A big elaborate website was the internet equivalent: proving someone had invested £ and was here to stay.

You can't trust that any more."

It reminds me of "Nigerian Prince" scams... people wondered why they were so transparently false and full of typos, but the smart view was the clumsiness and blatancy was a feature, not a bug - they were casting a very wide net and wanted only the most gullible fish. 

This changes that equation, but only somewhat. It's still pretty obvious it's a fake site (you can google based on the fake titles and author names if you want) since everything is put behind a "contact us" personal data harvesting form, but that is lurking beneath a very polished veneer.