Building a Future where Humans Vibe and AI Codes

Between my LinkedIn shaddow ban, building a few new exciting ventures we're about to annunce and the podcasts things have been blissfully “quiet” from my side. Today though, I need to “write to you guys about something”. I’ve been putting it off in the hopes that either my perspective would change or I would be able to put it in a way that would land best, and quite frankly, neither the former nor the latter have transpired-so here goes: the tech industry’s response to “vibe coding” is wrong. I’ll pad this and explain myself, but ultimately, I believe it is acting as a disservice to the software industry to have this reaction to what’s been happening of late.

The AI Storm Is Here. We’re All Already in It.

No one reading this will be blind to the devastating effects AI can -and now does indeed- have on creativity and creation. Be it images, as in the latest Ghibli-style scandal of last week; writings, as in the Meta stealing our books scandal (BTW, that got two of my books-and countless articles about banks for some reason -so if you would like to support despite how Zuck robbed me, please buy them for real from Amazon: People Before Tech is here and Tech-Led Culture is here); or code, when it comes to having inserted itself into tech business strategy, practices, and jargon; or any of the many other ways in which human toil and spark is at risk, AI’s presence is undeniable and we need to reckon with its arrival and think ahead.

Hopefully, there is a well-thought-out ahead we can design, where the ethics of our collaboration allow for protecting existing and future creation with a valuable “by human.” Hopefully, we get to collectively, as a species, sit down and carefully consider what we hold dear and valuable-and hopefully, we design and quickly execute a path where the human-machine interaction is balanced and moral. All this hope is a whole other conversation, though. What we’re here to talk about is the software industry’s reaction to AI’s admittedly dangerous and chaotic arrival.

Vibe Coding Isn’t the Problem-The Gatekeeping Response May Be

IT, Business, Product, Leadership, HR, Ops-you name it, there is no area this AI foray into our status quo doesn’t affect in today’s tech businesses, and it is only going to intensify at warp speed but the technology community’s response has been abuzz with near-unanimous condemnation.

In a nutshell, there are two hypotheses that most seem to be thrown around as cause for debate in a myriad of forms: the “Will AI replace programmers?” and the “AI-generated code is garbage” one. The former is interesting and remains to be seen, but the latter is the crux of the issue we discuss today and the backdrop of tens of articles around LinkedIn.

The tech community is appalled at the number of applications and features created by neophytes that enjoy the low barrier to coding entry that the explosion of AI tools brings to every Joe and Jill. They deplore the lack of reliability and sustainability. They already saw apps with no genuine back-end, appalling security, lack of pipeline and ability to maintain or upgrade, and a complete lack of understanding of software architecture principles reflected in a few loud disasters in the past year. Some of the vibe code has already famously backfired, and AI is still 70% “hululu” (hallucinatory), so the outrage is natural, the mistrust is natural, the disdain in the face of broken pipes and clear future mounting risk of vibe-code making it to production and infecting every backend is a natural reaction.

What We’re Really  (Rightfully) Afraid Of and What Excites

Me? I’m not a techie per se, as I can barely write a few lines of code-I would have said “without Googling” in the day, but that feels superfluous now!-but after 25 years at the intersection of tech and business, I see all the many facets of these separate perspectives from a uniquely personal vantage point, as I’ve had each of those hats on at one point or another.  You could say I know why vibe coding blows and why, but I know why it rocks and why that is too.

As a creator who is losing income to AI impersonation and content assimilation every day and sees what it does to the creative industry, I loathe the current state of affairs with a passion, of course. As someone who doesn’t think AI will replace us in the software industry-or anywhere else completely, any time soon-I still think we need a valid “ethical contract” in place ASAP. As an intrapreneur and founder of software companies with DevOps fetishes and SRE magic, of course I am sharing much of the same concerns and am appalled by the ever-growing mass of applications churned out with no concern for the bigger picture or how sustainable or scalable any of this instant code a machine once wrote live in front of our marvelling eyes really is, once we deploy it out there.

But also, you know what? Ever the ableist, self-tormenting ADHDer, my career never stayed firmly on either the business or the tech side of things-or I would have joined into the stream of protesting and accusing pieces. But I can’t because I’m all Product at heart. And as a non-programmer CPO who has led multiple software product teams, I am feeling freed, I admit. Yes, I’m churning out prototypes (and “prompt-based-project-initialisations”™?!), but beyond that -which is magic Invision would have lent my team as far back as pre-pandemic-, I’m in love with the possibilities, the speed of shared visibility, the capability of common language, and ultimately yes, the capability to break past the IT gatekeeping we have been suffering for years, where we met more “computer says no”s than we can count. As that Product Owner? It was about time!