AI: The Flex Tape Of Modern Programming

Content "Higher-Order-Vibes" Are Killing the Vibe Coding Industry I used to be a 10x Vibecoder. A prompt artisan with five years of vibe experience on my CV. My job was to whisper sweet nothings into our company's overpriced ChatGPT wrapper. The MVPs shipped one after the other. I was good. Then, word come out about "Higher-Order-Vibes": Prompts which coaxed Als to act like vibe coders. Some Satoshi-wannabe released the whitepaper anonymously, and it became the talk of every CTO. It was a replacement. A dehumanizing monstrosity which stood against everything I vibed for. My first day with HOV, I fed it a hand-crafted prompt for a meditation app. Then, it responded: > Prompt too detailed. Over-specified. Try to feel it more. I'll take it from here. Then it generated the app. It was perfect. Better than anything I could have put into wishful words. It even chose to use Elm instead of Svelte, and wrote a 500-word justification explaining that the vibe was more aligned like that." Let this be a warning. Our craft, our vibing age is coming to an end.

The classic AI hallucination in its natural habitat! Someone asked ChatGPT to review their 15-19k line trading algorithm, and instead of saying "that's too much code for me to process," it went full project manager mode with the classic "I'll get back to you in 48-72 hours" response. The desperate "(help)" at the end perfectly captures that moment when you realize your AI assistant thinks it's a human contractor who needs a weekend to review your code. Bonus points for the "Gone Wild" tag – because nothing says wild like an LLM pretending it needs sleep and work-life balance!

Remember when we actually had to understand algorithms? Now it's just "fancy bear, what's the optimal way to balance this binary tree?" And Stack Overflow? That's just AI with extra steps and judgment. But coding without internet? That's like trying to remember your ex's phone number – theoretically possible but why would you put yourself through that pain? The real pros among us still have that O'Reilly book collection gathering dust somewhere, just in case the apocalypse hits and we need to remember how pointers work.

Storage space? No problem. 1TB? Plenty. But 43GB of RAM? That's where the smile fades. The meme perfectly captures that moment when you find a cool AI model (deepseek-1:70b) that could run locally, but then reality hits—your machine needs more RAM than most data centers. It's like being told you can have a Ferrari, but only if you can fit it in your studio apartment. The five stages of AI grief: excitement, hope, realization, despair, and finally acceptance that cloud computing exists for a reason.

Ah, the classic bell curve of AI anxiety. The folks at the low end of the IQ spectrum are blissfully confident they can't be replaced because they don't understand what's coming. The geniuses at the high end know they're safe because they're the ones building the AI overlords. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the middle—just smart enough to understand the threat but not brilliant enough to be irreplaceable—are sweating bullets. This is basically the tech industry's version of "ignorance is bliss" meets "knowledge is power," with the vast majority of us stuck in purgatory. Twenty years in this field and I'm still not sure if I should be learning to code better or learning to make coffee for the robots.

GitHub Copilot: "I'll help you debug this code!" Also Copilot: *confidently points out a non-existent capitalization issue while completely missing the actual bug* It's like having a junior dev who speaks with absolute certainty while leading you down rabbit holes that waste hours of your life. The real bug is probably something completely different, but hey, at least Copilot made you feel productive for 5 seconds before crushing your soul. The AI revolution is here, folks - and it's just as confused as we are! 🤦‍♂️