Josh On Design

A diatribe in when I am greatly disappointed in my industry.

If you live on planet earth and you are at all connected to software you've probably tried out 'vibe coding', ie: using an AI tool to write software for you. As someone who's been writing software for close to four decades I've seen code automation tools come and go. Believe it or not, people used to talk about Visual Basic in the same breathless tones of today's vibe coding tools. The outcome has always been that the new tech never lives up to the hype but can be useful in some contexts. The tricky part is always figuring out what it's good at and what it isn't. I believe these AI tools will go the same way; but hey, maybe this time it's different. I can't talk about what I haven't experienced, so I tried experiments this week. Here's what I learned.

True high level Artificial Intelligence, the kind we read about in novels and hear crazy stories about from futurists, won't be like the movies. There won't be a Her that we fall in love with. There won't be a HAL 9000 who turns against us. When we finally build a true self-learning AI, it won't be anything at all like a human intelligence. This shouldn't be a surprise. We have half a century of results to show this is true.