True, but it's also not your job to understand what post-docs are suggesting (hopefully), unlike post-docs who kind of need to understand what LLMs are suggesting.
I think it's most likely the big labs have something close enough to what they'd call[0] "AGI" that they're now calling for regulation to lock up the market and prevent competition.
[0] Whether they've actually achieved some definition of AGI is way less important in this context than whether they can /sell/ what they've built as AGI.
> with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step
Sure you can, why wouldn't you? Good models these days spit out architecture and code fairly indistinguishable from your average developer.
It's always hard to jump into an existing project and understand it all, but it's doable and in 2026 it's no harder to jump into a vibed project than it is to jump into any other project (with exceptions in both directions, of course).
You still have the code and can switch back to "fully human" (or any other point on the spectrum of human-ai) any time you want by just opening the same editor you would use if you cloned any other project.
I think this is a severely outdated take that was true a few years ago, but has not been true for at least 1-2 years. Especially from the top models at the top labs.
Qualitative measurement is always hard, but plenty of studies have come out in the past year that generally find many models' code to be roughly equal to human code in terms of maintainability, complexity, readability, etc.
You can do this if you hold its hand a lot. Claude by default will do insane levels of abstraction for small things. Also make Python docstrings 3x longer than the actual code.
>Sure you can, why wouldn't you? Good models these days spit out architecture and code fairly indistinguishable from your average developer.
Good lord no, AI generated code isn't remotely close to something even the most insane human would generate. And if someone did you would seriously have to question what was going through their head. Everything from naming conventions to the flow of logic is twisted and often non-sensical. Plus the commenting and verbosity of code is ridiculous.Claude constantly makes up new terms to describe things that leave you wondering what it's talking about. Yesterday Claude started referring to some sort of logic as "finger-splint".
I don't know about online dating, but I think the vibe coders I've interacted with the past few years break down into two distinct groups:
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
> I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
That's exactly the sentiment I'm referring to.
I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).
I'd also argue that theory and architecture have always been closer to "software engineering" than coding ever was, but I also acknowledge I've got a bit of a bias belonging to group 2 (otherwise: been coding for ~25 years).
>I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).
This is a dangerous game people are playing. One where people trick themselves into believing that ideation == creation. Not only are they not the same, framing it as such gives people licensure to crowd out the actual creatives who spent countless hours creating the inputs to these models.
Furthermore, I disagree with the following:
>I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc).
What are these barriers people keep referring to that prevented people from creating music, art, stories pre-2022? If someone owned a phone, laptop, etc. in 2022 they already had access any number of free digital tools to assist in making music, art, stories, home made films. Hell, you can buy a pen and notebook from a store for a handful of dollars.
What you really mean is that pre-2022 nobody could produce a decent looking photo, song, or program without having to spend a lot of time learning about that craft. But that isn't a barrier--someone making a shitty song is still making music.
People just want the ability to generate content which resembles quality without having worked for it. In practice, this kind of behavior is far closer to consumption than craft/art/making/whatever.
Implementation became cheaper but it’s still not cheap. I’m working on an implementation for a runtime that’s been going on for 4 months of 24/7 constant Sol and now Astra work. When things go wrong it costs my time, which is my most valuable commodity. A week spent going in the wrong direction is still a week. If I can avoid that by planning better I will.
Always amazing to see how quickly the norm can become 'very outdated'. What GP described was all unheard of in 2023, brand new in 2024, and became pretty widely accepted in 2025.
The "I love AI" posts are just as bad as the "I hate AI" posts, and the same "this is my opinion on AI" posts are as bad as the onslaught of poorly-AI-vibed demo posts. Makes sense to filter them all out IMO.
Because the mathematicians consulted 25 or so years ago believed their solutions would lead to the greatest amount of interesting new maths to explore, and because they had been validated as being hard by being attempted and not solved for a long time.
I have a hunch the real killer feature of assistants like this will actually be the ability to identify moments like this where it'd actually be helpful, instead of relying on users to actually try/do everything with it.
Ironically, I feel like LLMs have really unlocked Windows work since they all know how to use Powershell and all the weird Windows commands/hacks that you otherwise either wouldn't even know about, or would have to Google every time.
I used to hate working in Windows, but now it feels roughly comparable to Mac (though at the risk of inciting an OS war, I do feel like Linux still beats both out...)
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