I’m only a casual coder (although I hope to get better in the coming years), but this is how I feel in the office when someone farts a half formed, semiliterate speech to text little dingleberry into ChatGPT, and then sends as a professional email the full bodied thing it whips up based on it. I’ve got a colleague who used to be in “LD” classes when they were young and they’ve come a long way to being a near 30-year business professional in this department, and they have always struggled with reading and writing and so tools like Grammarly and now ChatGPT help this person take a fully-formed email and give it the once-over before sending, and I don’t judge that and that isn’t what I’m describing; what I mean is my boss (for example), who can’t string more than five written words together, or read a sentence any longer, and certainly isn’t interested in learning how to, who now uses ChatGPT to send page-long emails or “cook up” long and supposedly philosophical LinkedIn posts about leadership.

I cannot conceive of how a person does that, and sends it with a straight face, totally shameless. Why should I even bother to respond to something like that? Who am I responding to? It certainly isn’t the supposed author. My college program mentor was doing the same thing near the end of my degree program and it was so fucking obvious. He went from never responding to me to suddenly sending these long and enthusiastic emails that recited back to me every point I had made as though they were all worth reiterating (they weren’t), the way one might show one was actively listening (which itself only adds to the irony). And it is such a deep insult to receive one of these emails because it says at once that you both 1) don’t respect me enough to put your own thoughts in writing for me, or to have enough thoughts to write down to begin with and 2) that you think I’m a complete fucking idiot who either won’t notice your ruse, or am also a vapid creature, too vapid to care because “aren’t we all just doing it this way now?”

The philosophical argument against vibe coding seems pretty self evident although the most compelling “argument” I’ve seen against it, I saw on Lemmy, maybe a repost from BlueSky where someone pointed out that it’s the tech bros trying to take this one last manual tool from the hands and minds of users and turn it into a subscription for which our skills (like writing and composition) will inevitably atrophy to the point we cannot do it without the subscription service anymore. Pure evil.