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.
@canadaduane
Not to mention, everyone should have computing literacy, because not only does it teach one computational thinking skills which are useful in and of themselves outside of computing, but because you learn problem solving skills.
Asking a language model to build something for you that you’re going to rely on, may not mean what you ask it to build will work, or will be safe. It’s an llm. You need to be able to understand what it has given back to you to spot any errors. 2/
@canadaduane The reason why software development can cost “millions of dollars to thousands” is because they’re paying multiple highly skilled software developers who not only know how to build software, but know how to do it as a team, and know how to ensure their programs actually do what they’re supposed to do (by writing unit tests, documenting their code complying with any other none coding requirements like ethics)
genAI devalues the skill and labour that goes into making software. 3/
@canadaduane If you don’t understand fundamentally what your software is doing, you’re not going to be able to fix it.
Moreover, if you’re going to build software that you rely on, (hence why it can cost millions of $) and it fails, and someone gets hurt or even killed because of it, It’s on you. 4/
@canadaduane
I can see the appeal of wanting to build something just for you to do something custom you want, but I don’t think there’s a place in solarpunk, where you don’t learn this skill yourself, or ask one of your friends or a coding collective to help you customise existing off the self free open source solution to your needs.
Solarpunk is also a revolution of how we relate to one another and not just how we use technology. 5/
@canadaduane I think also one of the key things that influences this is that most of these generative AI models tend to be trained on stolen, uncredited work. And it’s often very hard to prove it when they often don’t share their work or do at times seem to lose evidence.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/21/24302606/openai-erases-evidence-in-training-data-lawsuit
There’s a reason why openAI declares it’s over if it’s not fairuse. Because the way they used this technology could not have been built without exploitation.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/openai-urges-trump-either-settle-ai-copyright-debate-or-lose-ai-race-to-china/