Vibe coding cleanup specialists

In this week’s Weird. Tech. Finds, I joked about how while vibe coding (using AI to code) increases productivity, it also increases bugs and security flaws.

This is a looming disaster. But it’s also a major opportunity.

People joke that we need “vibe coding cleanup specialists”, but the truth is this will be one of the world’s most valuable jobs in the next few years.

Vibe coding allows you to ideate like never before. But a visionary leader with a coding expert to help clean up the mess is a two-person team that can do pretty much anything in the world of tomorrow.

It’s not a joke, it’s a brilliant business/career plan.

Shiny becomes standard

What we marveled at two years ago is old hat now.

What impressed us moments ago is table stakes today.

How quickly the miraculous new turns to the expected old.

The right kind of crappy

In my house, there are two kinds of “right”:

Right right: Think pristine, polished, Michelin Star, pop-music perfection

and the right kind of crappy.

A bad beer on a great beach is a great beer.

Sippin’ on a coconut with a pig named Poncho in Costa Rica is exactly what you’d hope for.

We all know about the first source of joy. But the second? Magic.

Don’t upgrade the tools, upgrade your thinking

We all have access to exactly the same tools, for $20/month each.

The ingredients of future technology will all be well known and widely available.

But some will do wondrous things with these ingredients, and others will use them to escape the responsibility of being a human.

The most important thing we can all do right now is expand our concept of what’s possible.

The future hasn’t changed

Well, we don’t yet have Star Trek’s food replicator, but many of the things our science fiction writers talked about decades ago are coming true today.

2001: A Space Odyssey has many relics of the 60s, but the overarching point: Who do you trust when two infallible, superhuman AIs disagree with each other? When one of two AIs, each incapable of making a mistake, makes a mistake?

That question is as relevant today as it was half a century ago.

Carl Sagan’s 1990 keynote is no less true now than when he gave it.

Sure, some of our predictions haven’t come true, like pretty much anything from the Jetsons.

But what’s amazing is how much has.

It’s a testament to how far in advance humans can see things.

What do you know for sure is going to happen in the next 20 years? Can you work on that today?