Vibin' With Erlang

Why is the look of the code even a thing when vibe coding? Why is the language you use even a thing when vibe coding? Vibe code! It won! Vibe code Javascript! It won too!

The worrying bit is that code like the forementioned could be the standard for what we tolerate — or even what we strive for. [...] I worry only because of the craft of fine code will be lost for good.

If it helps alleviate your worry, this could change when the incentives change. There's that Brian Kernighan quote:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

I suspect something similar applies to writing the ugliest possible code that still compiles. How will you debug it? Today's answer is to use brute force, because tokens are cheap. But tomorrow, the AI companies will decide to stop selling tokens at a loss, and models that write cleaner code will have a competitive advantage. "Refactor this messed up codebase" might be a benchmark in the future, who knows.

The catch, though, is that optimizing for debugability is not 100% the same as optimizing for beauty—though I think it correlates.