Liz Cory

@evcory.bsky.social

94 Followers 395 Following

data viz design & dev @newamerica.org

“Vibe coding” retains the implication that you can’t explain or even understand how something works. But under the pressure of AI hype and its championing of incomprehension, there seems to be not a “vibe shift” but a “vibe” shift occurring, as the term drifts toward a different connotation. Where vibe once conveyed something that can’t be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun. “Giving in to the vibe,” then, means deliberately refusing to understand, as though that would be to defy AI’s supremacy. One should let AI handle the data and the details so that you can just have gratified impulses, which are ultimately just a matter of data being manipulated to your liking — prompting, waiting, tweaking, and trying again until you are satisfied or bored with what you’re doing. Being involved with the thinking process, the details, would be to go against the vibe. It’s a superfluous burden that sets you against the spirit of the times. “Vibe” in this usage tries to lend exuberance and cachet to what amounts to being passive and negligent. It borrows from the earlier connotations of relaxing into conditions and not disrupting them by trying to pick them apart, but now applies it to the alienation that “AI” must produce if it is going to be profitable for its makers. “Vibe” evokes the the dream of a life that contains no processes, no skills, no research, no effort — just feelings that machines interpret and turn into substance. If “vibe” once could refer to a range of nameless feelings, now it refers to thoughtlessness, in every sense of the word.
Red ice sled on a frozen lake with the label “Esla”