@colorblindcowboy@mastodon.art Well, I am of the opinion that generating good code (not good software, mind you, but good code) would be an early win. So I don't think that "Vibe coding is inherently bad and useless" is true at all. Datacentres are bad, Capitalism is bad, but the tool is just a tool.
I like Doctorow's Centaur/Reverse Centaur analogy for this stuff. If you have a skill, it can augment your skill, like how (see my next toot) it really is speeding me up a lot, to look at Google's AI answer, when I am seeking to do something on my servers. Yes, I still could find a manual or seek out a person or forum post, but, the answer I actually need is right there immediately; hard to ignore the usefulness of that.
Not everyone who is capable of being a good programmer, takes up programming as a personal skill development. But I think that anyone who does have that potential, if they spend time typing out code that works, they will inevitably become programmers, in much the same way that I became a piano player, of sorts, by taking what I already knew about music theory - scales, meter, tempo, etc - and started doing it on a set of piano keys, six months of several hours a day running scales, finding the chord triads and inversions, etc.
Eventually I could look at a chord chart and know how to play the song, though that doesn't necessarily translate to being able to sit down and play it in just any key. But songs in certain keys I can do that now.
So, take some vibe coder who has been typing in working code, ingesting every word they type, seeing how the syntactic structures work, brackets open means they close later, maybe there's a ; at the end of every line, they will notice, and if they have the acumen to understand it, like I had the acumen to understand what was happening on a keyboard, over time they will simply learn how to put code together themselves.
There is an upside to this stuff. The bad comes from capitalism.
