Vibe coding is an AI-driven software development approach, where developers guide AI assistants to generate functional code from natural language prompts. It emphasizes high-level direction over manual, line-by-line coding.
Notes on Generative AI
Let’s create a map of issues that are emerging in the current generative AI backlash.
- Energy use.
- Water use
- Rare mineral and resources, memory is way more expensive now.
- Intellectual property theft and profiting on the commons, intellectual property laundering
- Hype and financial speculation, bubble, every dollar invested in ai is not invested in more valuable things, US economy entirely dependent on this technology
- It doesn’t increase productivity significantly
- Takes people’s job, especially entry level, doesn’t create new ones
- Used as excuse to lay off workers and make them work more
- Deskilling, makes some jobs worse, AI baby sitters
- When used as replacement for search engine it diverts traffic from content creators
- Aesthetic: Slop, averaging and devaluing of the arts
- Paranoia and loss of authenticity, fake videos, real artists being accused of using AI
- Erases the gap between taste and skills, so one doesn’t feel the need to cultivate either
- Aid for scams and spam
- Makes it easy to falsify and manipulate news, public opinion
- Pollutes the internet with slop
- Hallucinations and fake news
- Top down, opaque manipulation, the case of Grok
- It’s being force fed to you everywhere
- It’s monopolistic, few companies can compete
- It’s a subsidized service, they want to make you dependent, and then they will jack up the prices
- Unreliable when used for coding (security issues),
- For high stakes purposes: medical diagnosis, benefits, crime prevention
- Amplification of biases in the dataset
- Security issues Open Claw AI assistant
- Privacy, your conversations and if you use agents your friends are sent back to openAI etc
- Cheating! Biggest threat to education ever
- Dilemma for students who don’t wanna cheat
- Cognitive offload Makes you bad at writing, reading, analyzing, and coding
- Undermines your confidence
- If everybody uses AI who is going to post new solutions, new stuff?
- Epistemic breakdown, you access knowledge but you don’t know where it comes from, no way to assess the sources.
- AI psychosis!
- Really bad for people with mental issues, suicide ideation, relationship issues, delusions
- AI Sycophantism has a Dunning-Kruger effect in the users (think they are more intelligent)
THAT SAID, AI as coding aid can be useful and will be likely expected in most workplaces.
At best it speeds up the process of looking for existing solutions online and adapting them to your project.
At worst it creates code you don’t understand which becomes more and more unwieldy and unmaintainable. It reduces the incentive to come up with your own solutions, it atrophies your coding muscles, and sucks the pleasure out of programming.
Rule of thumb: don’t use AI code you don’t understand unless it’s boilerplate and abstract-able from your game logic. Ask the AI for explanations if necessary, it can be a competent teacher.
Reverse engineering a game
Recreate your assigned video game in p5.js with an AI assistant (I’ll use chatGPT).
Rules
-You are not allowed to reference the name or any revealing elements (eg “asteroids”), pretend you are coming up with the game as we speak.
-Don’t worry about the graphics, keep it abstract, use placeholders.
-You can manually tweak the code.
-Add features one by one, don’t try to describe the whole game.
-You will share the conversation as part of the delivery.
1) Create and account an log on p5 js
2) Analyze the game: what are the verbs? What are the nouns?
3) Start from the player controls. Describe in detail, in the most unambiguous way possible, the way the player object behaves.
You should start declaring the language and intent like: “I’m making a game in p5.js”.
Let’s try to do this together with Asteroids.