I started a local vibecoders group because I think it has the potential to help my community.
(What is vibecoding? It’s a new word, coined last month. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)
Why might it be part of a solarpunk future? I often see and am inspired by solarpunk art that depicts relationships and family happiness set inside a beautiful blend of natural and technological wonder. A mom working on her hydroponic garden as the kids play. Friends chatting as they look at a green cityscape.
All of these visions have what I would call a 3-way harmony–harmony between humankind and itself, between humankind and nature, and between nature and technology.
But how is this harmony achieved? Do the “non-techies” live inside a hellscape of technology that other people have created? No! At least, I sure don’t believe in that vision. We need to be in control of our technology, able to craft it, change it, adjust it to our circumstances. Like gardening, but with technology.
I think vibecoding is a whisper of a beginning in this direction.
Right now, the capital requirements to build software are extremely high–imagine what Meta paid to have Instagram developed, for instance. It’s probably in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s likely that only corporations can afford to build this type of software–local communities are priced out.
But imagine if everyone could (vibe)code, at least to some degree. What if you could build just the habit-tracking app you need, in under an hour? What if you didn’t need to be an Open Source software wizard to mold an existing app into the app you actually want?
Having AI help us build software drops the capital requirements of software development from millions of dollars to thousands, maybe even hundreds. It’s possible (for me, at least) to imagine a future of participative software development–where the digital rules of our lives are our own, fashioned individually and collectively. Not necessarily by tech wizards and esoteric capitalists, but by all of us.
Vibecoding isn’t quite there yet–we aren’t quite to the Star Trek computer just yet. I don’t want to oversell it and promise the moon. But I think we’re at the beginning of a shift, and I look forward to exploring it.
P.S. If you want to try vibecoding out, I recommend v0 among all the tools I’ve played with. It has the most accurate results with the least pain and frustration for now. Hopefully we’ll see lots of alternatives and especially open source options crop up soon.
I agree with your assessment, but I’m more pessimistic about LLMs as a technology. The Luddites tell us that machines are not value-neutral - we should ask who the LLMs serve.
The core function of an LLM is to enclose public commons (aggregate, open-access human knowledge) in a centrally-controlled black box. It’s not a coincidence that corporations are trying to replace search with LLM summaries - the point is for the model to be an intermediary between the user and the information they need.
Vibecoding embraces this intermediation - to the vibecoder, an understanding of the technology they’re building is simply a cost that must be surmounted, and if they can avoid paying it, so much the better. This is misguided. Knowledge is power, and we cede that power at our peril. Solarpunk is punk, and punk is DIY, and DIY means taking back ownership of spaces and technologies.
I won’t say that it’s inherently wrong to cede that ownership - tactically. Perhaps the OP is building essential tools that their communities can’t access otherwise. But short term fixes a solarpunk future do not make.
I have all the same issues most of y’all have with the moral and environmental issues with giant corporate models but I take issue with this statement:
The core function of an LLM is to generate statically plausible text (which is what my totally open source mobile keyboard is doing as I type using a very small transformer based LLM, for instance)
Using it to provide an answer to a search instead of returning sources is 100% the evil you described. But it is a shitty use for a technology that would be unfair to reflect entirely on the technlogy itself.
LLMs are not going away. We might disagree on their usefulness (I flip flop daily on my opinion about it, which is usually a sign that something is inherently neutral) but zealot blanket rejections worry me a bit.
The other knee-jerk reaction about energy (and water, but that is not unavoidable) usage is also something I try to process a bit compartimentalized. It needs to improve and the scale of growth is unsustainable. Does that invalidate everything currently explored or researched?
The push for more efficiency is vital and rightful. Do more with less. But while it’s fair to criticize someone for using an incandescent light bulb instead of better technology to, say, illuminate a room, criticizing them for using light in that room is wrong, IMHO. We don’t need less light (well, yes, outdoors, but for different reasons), we need better technology and cleaner energy so we don’t need to worry about who is turning on which light. I get that “AI” is power hungry, and that needs to improve, but I am very uncomfortable with the idea that we should decide a priori if something is worth using energy or not. It’s… A bit draconian?
I know its not a super original position (“a tool is just a tool”). I’m trying to work through this myself. As I type this I think of PoW blockchains as a counterexample that I would bring up to debate myself. Yes, it looks like there are usages that appear to be inherently “wrong”. Why do I find blockchain worse? Because I consider it unworthy of the energy spent for it, which makes me “guilty” of what I criticized…
Damn, It’s hard to try to have opinions!
More in topic: vibe coding (super icky name, jfc) might be vaguely OK for prototyping in some cases, or extremely limited cases where you can almost prove correctness. Or yeah, personal tools where you’re the only person to be responsible and affected by the results. Anything more than that, and it makes me nervous. It has not much to share with solarpunk per se. But AI aided development (maybe a broader and less silly named concept) is not antithetical to solarpunk, IMHO. The DIY nature you ( @strongoose@slrpnk.net) describe doesn’t go down at infinity. To build a community garden from scratch you first need to invent the universe. You not knowing how to invent the universe. You still own the technology if you use a tool you don’t fully understand the internals of. You need to retain the option to understand it though, I agree.