AI – Vibe Coding – Duck Soup

Over the last few years, AI has helped me significantly. It started off with pasting code and getting suggestions back. Then I started giving it requests to write boilerplate and pasting code back. Then it started editing things for me and now it’s pretty much that for a new project, it will write the boiler place give me the head start that I need.

I don’t really like it as I like coding. I don’t like the pain of coding, the stupid foibles of a framework that do your head in (hello Odoo) but I like creating stuff and solving issues and with AI it’s a lot easier to get things done, be productive and creative and solve more issues.

If I don’t do this I will be dead because if you’re competing with clients who use AI with no understanding but generate a lot of nice looking stuff you will lose unless you, gentle reader, who does has understanding, uses AI as well to create something better. I don’t like it because it’s change and it feels dirty and like “cheating”.

There is an old joke, applied to synthesisers, about trying to be “real” and thinking you needed a proper instrument and then you needed an instrument you constructed yourself and then you needed to make the raw materials yourself, ending with breeding animals for drum skins or guitar strings or whatever else. I could google it but that is cheating as well. So no more cheating and I could write a new system myself which would take a long time to do as although I can do all the core parts (model design,  UI design, system structure, deployment, security plugins, SSL, Linux configs, css, html, javascript, customer interactions, duck soup etc) that will take a lot of time. Or I could employ a team of people who can do it and deal with a bunch of misfits and divas and unrecognised geniuses and idiots who think they need sleep and family time and (would you believe it!?), wages. And have team meetings and blame storming sessions and drunken sessions of regret about the latest cockup and … god knows what else again. 

Or I could ask AI to write the boiler plate and then ask it to tweak the structure and tweak the design and get it to interpret what the hell the customer is asking for this time and, you know, just cheat. And get things done. 

And that is where I am at the moment. I can do so much and solve so many issues without the pain of people. Or I can do it the hardware and be beaten out of the market by others who dirty themselves by embracing the technology. Is this like the days when those fancy C programmers cheated instead of writing the assembler code themselves. Or used a SQL database and those brain dead query languages rather then writing all that stuff to the disk yourself and pulling it out the proper way, byte by byte, and painted it, pixel by pixel to the screen. 

I feel guilty but I feel productive.