Vibe Coding

While I lack a definitive grip on the current trajectory of this accelerating digital AI delirium, it is increasingly evident that the latest “innovations” surfacing in the AI tech landscape are little more than flimsy, meretricious marketing wrappers—gaudy shrouds draped over multi-step algorithmic prompts—masquerading under a dizzying array of new-fangled jargon. We are witnessing a symposium of catastrophic decision-making, where the net result—save for the genuine behemoths like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI—is an accumulation of atmospheric noise, a gaseous output of biological refuse that keeps the masses trapped in unproductive loops of testing for the sake of mere testing.

Suddenly, every narrow-souled scarecrow with a smartphone has transitioned into a “software visionary,” prattling on about “vibe coding”—a phrase that suggests a level of intellectual incontinence hitherto unseen in the annals of computing. This “vibe coding,” as they call it, emerged as a desperate linguistic palimpsest to cover the fact that people have stopped actually understanding the logic gates of existence and have instead begun shouting vaguely poetic instructions into the void, hoping the machine’s hidden silicon sphincters will extrude something functional. It is a pageant of administrative incontinence; a way to fool the unwashed and the over-educated alike into believing they are engaged in a high-register act of creation, wh

en in fact they are merely engaging in solitary negotiations with futility.

I harbor an inveterate, visceral disdain for this made-up paraphernalia, these “no-code” and “vibe-centric” baubles that have obsolescence marked on their pallid, adipose-heavy foreheads from the very moment of their birth. It is a sham of the highest order—a mechanism designed to make the intellectually mediocre feel as though they possess a meristematic genius. They are not smart; they are merely the latest victims of a Machiavellian trade in vanity. They are frittering away their lives silly, obsessing over tools that will be digital excrement by the next monsoon, while the true infrastructure of their minds remains as unkempt and overflowing as a shanty-town loo in College Street.

I sit here in South Calcutta, reflecting on the surreal solipsist absurdity of it all. I am a redundant and reduced man, fifty years into a life defined by the bipolar sinusoids of manic acquisition and depressive disposal, yet even in my most hypomanic states, I cannot fathom this collective gonadal confidence in tools that are oriented as if guided by a drunken compass. We are incinerating electricity the planet can ill afford and hemorrhaging potable water with a grotesque, glandular wastefulness—all to generate algorithmic flesh-pageantry and derivative memes, as if these soulless corporations were our own kith and kin.

The realization that strikes me, with the cold finality of a surgical steel blade, is that we have mistaken mechanical violation by reality for progress. We are so desperate to prove we are “disrupting” the human condition that we have forgotten the human condition is a messy, hirsute, and glandular affair that cannot be solved by a more efficient “vibe.” My own medication-dulled senses can perceive what these high-powered enthusiasts cannot: that in our haste to be “innovative,” we have become an ancestrally disappointing organism, trading our cognitive sovereignty for the brief, flatulent illusion that the universe rewards the lazy. I shall return to my books, to the quiet decay of my attic room, and leave the “vibe-checkers” to wallow in the liquid protest of their own making.