Perverse incentives of vibe coding

I think we are in the Flash era again lol.

You remember those days right? All those Flash sites.

> Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine responses in our brain’s reward pathways, similar to gambling behaviors.

Though I'm not a "vibe coder" myself I very much recognize this as part of the "appeal" of GenAI tools more generally. Trying to get Image Generators to do what I want has a very "gambling-like" quality to it.

Yeah, I've had that thought too.

I think a lot about Motie engineering versus human engineering. Could Motie engineering be practical? Is human engineering a fundamentally good idea, or is it just a reflection of our working memory of 7 +/- 2? Biology is Motie-esque, but it's pretty obvious we are nowhere near a technology level that could ever bring a biological system up from scratch.

If Motie engineering is a good idea, it's not a smooth gradient. The Motie-est code I've seen is also the worst. It is definitely not the case that getting a bit more Motie-esque, all else being equal, produces better results. Is there some crossover point where it gets better and maybe passes our modular designs? If AIs do get better than us at coding, and it turns out they do settle on Motie-esque coding, no human will ever be able to penetrate it ever again. We'd have to instruct our AI coders to deliberately cripple themselves to stay comprehensible, and that is... economically a tricky proposition.

After all, anyone can write anything into a novel they want to and make anything work. It's why I've generally stopped reading fiction that is explicitly meant to make ideological or political points to the exclusion of all else; anything can work on a page. Does Motie engineering correspond to anything that could be manifested practically in reality?

Will the AIs be better at modularization than any human? Will they actually manifest the Great OO Promise of vast piles of amazingly well-crafted, re-usable code once they mature? Or will the optimal solution turn out to be bespoke, locally-optimized versions of everything everywhere, and the solution to combining two systems is to do whatever locally-sensible customizations are called for?

(I speak of the final, mature version, however long that may be. Today LLMs are kind of the worst of both worlds. That turns out to be a big step up from "couldn't play in this space at all", so I'm not trying to fashionably slag on AIs here. I'm more saying that the one point we have is not yet enough to draw so much as a line through, let alone an entire multi-dimensional design methodology utility landscape.)

I didn't expect to live to see the answers, but maybe I will.

Can we please stop using 'vibe coding' to mean 'ai assisted coding'?? (best breakdown, imo: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/)

Is it really vibe coding if you are building a detailed coding plan, conducting "git-based experimentation with ruthless pruning", and essentially reviewing the code incrementally for correctness and conciseness? Sure, it's a process dependent on AI, but it's very far from nearly "forget[ing] that the code even exists".

That all said, I do think the article captures some of the current cost/quality dilemmas. I wouldn't jump to conclusions that these incentives are actually driving most current training decisions, but it's an interesting area to highlight.

I've pretty clearly seen the critical thinking ability of coworkers who depend on AI too much sharply decline over the past year. Instead of taking 30 seconds to break down the problem and work through assumptions, they immediately copy/paste into an LLM and spit back what it tells them.

This has lead to their abilities stalling while their output seemingly goes up. But when you look at the quality of their output, and their ability to get projects over the last 10% or make adjustments to an already completed project without breaking things, it's pretty horrendous.