135 karma · joined October 26, 2016
Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (1906)
There's an observation.
It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes.
So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool anymore either.
I just don’t find it believable.
I think that is sort of their point. There was one thing that you, I, and millions of others would call infringement, (scraping the whole Internet to train proprietary models) but the law deemed it "fair use", and they got away with it with impunity. Now there is this other thing that we'd all (easily) call infringement, and I understand why people doubt that this time will be any different.
We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.
It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified.
But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere.
I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.
Voice assistants, AI pins, and whatever other speech-based interfaces they come up with next will always be "nice to have", but I don't think anybody should be throwing away their keyboards anytime soon. We may have transformed how we make computers work for us, yet the ways we interact with them are much harder to revolutionize, because they are grounded in the physical, neurological, and habitual constraints of human existence. All of which is to say, when I look at the future, I still see a lot of typing.
I’m not sure if this counts as “vibe coding” per se, but I like that this mentality keeps my workday somewhat similar to how it was for decades. Finding/creating holes that the agent can fill with minimal adult supervision is a completely new routine throughout my day, but I think obsessing over maintainability will pay off, like it always has.