'Vibe coding' is likely the future of programming, whether you like it or not. 'Whether you like it or not' is doing a lot of work here, because it places commonsense limits on how much you can dislike something, and how that dislike can be articulated. I certainly think we are going to see AI researchers get 𝖋𝖚𝖈𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖉, and their killers lionised on Reddit and Mastodon by sociopaths labouring under the illusion of moral majority. There is certainly no shortage of technical and creative types Sephiroth-posting about the prospective social death penalty that will be enacted upon the users and enablers of generative AI after the revolution, when we've put the technocapital slop machine behind us, or against the wall. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a swastika with too many arms—or too few!—carved into your forehead by a graphic design student.

Moreover, there is no shortage of public ideation regarding what I've come to call 'occult technokarmic debt'. This is the intuition that life imitates the TV Tropes Wiki and that AI secretly eats your soul, even as the Ozempic eats your body, because Nature or Nature's God is not mocked. This is also the intuition which undergirds predictions that Bryan Johnson is going to drop dead of a metabolic syndrome hitherto unknown to medicine any moment now, and wouldn't that be funny?

(No, what would be extremely funny is if Bryan Johnson, having overcome depression and the haters, actually became immortal and indeed started ageing in reverse.)

But it's unlikely that progress in the mechanisation of intelligence can be 'killed in any way that matters', either by force of opinion or force of arms. It is also unlikely that developers and industries will collectively decide that a tremendous mistake has been made, and that a retvrn to trvdition is in order. Technological unemployment and underemployment will proceed at accelerating pace. Perhaps AI will eat some peoples' souls to lesser or greater degrees, but you will be denied the comfort of the sort of philosophical zombie apocalypse you can comprehend.

If it's any consolation, I suspect that the future of programming—insofar as it involves substantive human intervention—is probably measured in single digit years. Everyone will be more or less equally unemployable and there will be no reason to feel especial embarrassment. These sorts of Fukuyamaian statements are risky: they may require quiet deletion at a later date. Alternatively, I could accumulate a gaggle of weird sycophants who will gaslight detractors with charges that my thesis—whilst correct—is too subtle for them to grasp. Nevertheless, the gist is that vibe coding works (to the extent that it does) by fruitfully raising the level of abstraction of human interaction with the tool. In this view, vibe coding may be considered a type of declarative programming, understood as describing what a program should do, but leaving the implementational details to the tool. There doesn't appear to be a ceiling on the level of abstraction that such a system can operate at, in principle. The ability to critically observe the bigger picture is what requires a human in the loop, but it is plausible that this ability will be outstripped in degree, kind, or sheer speed by AI agents.

It has been said (by Andrej Karpathy?) that the most important programming language of the future is English. However, in the future, the cutting edge of software development will likely consist of inferring coherent software specifications from increasingly vague natural language requests. There's an old XKCD comic about the Ballmer Peak: the quasimythic level of alcohol intoxication which grants superhuman programming ability. I think we're going to see that there's no limit to how fucked up someone can get (unconsciousness notwithstanding) whilst still being able to effectively vibe code. This will be a side-effect of more general efforts to democratise programming to the radically inarticulate, a tide which lifts all boats. Learn to code? No need, the code will come to you.

But maybe unconscious programming is the future. Progress in this field is consummated not just when the human ability for orchestration is outstripped by AI, but when no human intent is required to initiate a course of software development. In the limiting case, vibe coding may evolve into systems which detect unexpressed needs and fulfil them automagically: all watched over by machines of loving grace. Your prompt a sense of discontent: an actual 'vibe'. This is a common theme in science fiction: the dual threat and promise of singularitarian fantasy.