One of Carl Jung’s famous quotes is to “Beware unearned wisdom.” Sometimes it’s brought up in the context of psychedelics. From LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Christopher Bache:
Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our normal capacity.
It’s all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become a deep and profound person, but this is a fool’s delusion.
Even when psychedelics allow us to experience the person we are in the process of becoming, we have to face the fact that we have not become this person yet, nor have we fully internalised the wonderful qualities we may have temporarily touched.
I’m starting to see some of the same things happening with vibe coding and LLM writing.
Sam Kriss at the New York Times took on the inevitably meta task of writing Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? It’s a good read that will tickle your mind, as the mimetic effects of model training data overfit and influence society, even in how we speak and write when not using AI.
I’m starting to get that “feel” now, sometimes when using software. The demo or functionality seems amazing, but when you begin to poke around the edges, it all crumbles. We think we have something amazing because a chatbot one-shot an application, but there may be a hidden technical debt there.
A big focus for me in this coming year is “back to basics”: ensuring the core functionality is robust. You can’t build a house on a foundation of sand. It’s very exciting and tempting to go to the new shiny thing, but you only earn that right when the fundamentals are solid.
It’s been funny hearing about OpenAI’s Code Red, because about 18 months ago, I declared Code Blue on WordPress.com. In a hospital, Code Red means a fire, which I don’t think is the analogy OpenAI was going for, but I unfortunately learned when my father passed that Code Blue means all hands on deck because a patient has a cardiac or respiratory arrest; it signals a critical, life-threatening medical emergency. All the best specialists swarm in and, hopefully, save the patient. (BTW, on WordPress.com, the team has done a fantastic job of shipping literally thousands of bug fixes and quality improvements, and keeping focus on that despite the pull to new initiatives. There’s much left to do, but it’s headed in the right direction.)
The Cambrian explosion of new stuff built by AI is just a phase, and AI-assisted coding can actually be incredible for maintenance and bug fixes. But the tools are only as good as the questions we ask them, so it will have to battle with human nature’s addiction to novelty.