Everyone’s got an opinion on vibe coding. Half the internet says it will save you £150,000 a year and you will never need a developer again. The other half says it is a dumpster fire of security holes and spaghetti code. Both camps are loud. Both camps are partially right. And lots of us watching the bunfight are just confused.
In this one, Tom and Corissa try to make sense of it — not by picking a side, but by honing some questions. Their lens is: bounded applicability. Some tools are good for some things. Nothing is good for everything. The hard part is knowing which is which.
Including-but-not-limited-to:
Tom’s first proper foray into Claude Code, a surprisingly useful Python script it produced in 15 minutes
A practical rubric: the questions to ask before you let an AI mess with your stuff
The developer who reviewed and approved every chunk of code and then came back a week later to find chaos
The architect’s clever marketing stunt that was already broken by the time anyone tried it
Why the surface sheen of coherence stops you thinking critically
Dave Snowden’s quietly devastating observation about what we’re actually doing when we accept AI outputs
Vibe-coded accounting software ... a brief thought experiment
This one's for anyone trying to navigate the hype — in any direction — without losing their critical faculties in the process.
Links & references
Theodore Sturgeon — science fiction writer; originator of Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap)
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Dave Snowden, cited via Corissa’s recollection of a LinkedIn post about AI
Episode 039: Bounded Applicability — the concept underpinning this episode’s diagnostic framework
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