Being an ethical programmer in a vibecoded world
I am a creative person, always was. It doesn't matter if it's video, audio or graphic design: any kind of artistic expression always had my interest and therefore I learned how to make stuff thanks to that. And I don't know if there's many people that know this, but programming –my job– is no different. A new project is an empty canvas in which you can develop your program in many different ways. How to structure the code, how to approach an issue and how to write your code at a semantic level, even.
You gotta appreciate the passionate artist guild, man. They knew how to convey the message that genAI is shit, both to what art means and the implications of its use. But sadly, the programmer guild is full of both tech bros and people who don't like the craft, but the paycheck that's often attached to it.
As a result, not just genAI is fully embraced by other programmers and businesses, but also the popularized message is now "it's just a tool", "there are no programmers that don't use it", "you're a gatekeeper". Nobody cares that it's a capitalistic machine built over fucktons of stole open source projects by the community. Fuck those hobbyist devs too.
Not only I'm forced to be a puppet at work, overseeing AI's vomited code instead of coding myself, but also every single project you look at on Github is now fucking vibecoded. I'm not going to name why this is so freaking bad or why I refuse to deploy any of that shit on my server for all the security holes they may contain, but this is devastating to me.
Devastating because, in the end, it's making me lose any interest in my own job, in what otherwise was my passion and what I studied for. Everywhere I look to I only read about how AI is changing the profession's paradigm and how I won't have to code because the machine will be doing it for me. But do you know what? I want to code. It is my way to express myself and it is important to me. I want to build stuff in my own way, with my own reasoned methods and workflows and keep learning to get better at it everyday. If I wanted to be in an assembly line, I would already be working in that.
Something else I read about this topic is how "manual" programmers will be what carpenters are to IKEA nowadays, which is sad as fuck too for many reasons. It seems that the only way to escape from this vibecoded hell is to success in building and market your own product, but as someone who never succeeded at anything, it's even more demoralizing.
I'm tired, b0ss.
Related posts
– Handwritten code, by Katherine Yang