Vibe Coding: Empowering and Imprisoning - Anil Dash

And a vibe coding tool absolutely won’t make something truly new. The most radical, disruptive, interesting, surprising, weird, fun innovations in technology have happened because people with a strange compulsion to do something cool had enough knowledge to get their code out into the world. The World Wide Web itself was not a huge technological leap over what came before — it took off because of a huge leap in insight into human nature and human behavior, that happened to be captured in code. The actual bits and bytes? They were mostly just plain text, much of which was in formats that had already been around for many years prior to Tim Berners-Lee assembling it all into the first web browser. That kind of surprising innovation could probably never be vibe coded, even though all of the raw materials might be scooped up by an LLM, because even if the human writing the prompt had that counterintuitive stroke of genius, the system would still be hemmed in by the constraints of the works it had been trained on. The past is a prison when you’re inventing the future.