Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, grab a seat and a lukewarm coffee. The new intern, bless his heart, insisted I read this "groundbreaking" blog post about... checks notes smudged with doughnut grease... "vibe coding." Oh, for the love of EBCDIC. It's like watching a kid discover you can add numbers together with a calculator and calling it "computational synthesis." Let's break down this masterpiece, shall we?
I've been staring at blinking cursors since before most of you were a twinkle in the milkman's eye, and I'm telling you, I've seen this show before. It just had a different name. Usually something with "Enterprise" or "Synergy" in it.
First off, this whole idea of "vibe coding" is just a fancy new term for "I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll ask the magic box to guess for me." Back in my day, we had "hope-and-pray coding." It involved submitting a deck of punch cards, waiting eight hours for the batch job to run on the mainframe, and praying you didn't get a ream of green-bar paper back with a single, cryptic ABEND code. The "vibe" was pure, unadulterated fear. You learned to be precise because a single misplaced comma meant you wasted a whole day and got chewed out by a manager who measured productivity in pounds of printout. This AI is just a faster way to be wrong.
So, this "Claude" thing can write a script to ping a network or turn a shell command into a Python module. Impressive. You know what else could do that? A well-caffeinated junior programmer with a copy of the K&R C book and a little initiative. You're celebrating a tool that automates tasks we were automating with shell scripts and ISPF macros back when your dad was still trying to figure out his Atari. You wanted a report from your backups? We had COBOL programs that could generate reports from tape archives that would make your eyes bleed. It's not a revolution; it's a slightly shinier bicycle.
And here's the part that really gets my goat. The author admits that when things got tricky, like with the C++ hexfloat parser, the AI completely fell apart on the edge cases. Color me shocked. This is the oldest story in the book. Any tool can handle the happy path. Real engineering, the kind that keeps a banking system from accidentally giving everyone a billion dollars, lives and dies in the edge cases. I've spent nights sleeping on a cot in the data center, staring at a hex dump to find one flipped bit that was causing a floating-point rounding error. This AI just wants to call stdlib and go home. It has no grit. It couldn't debug its way out of a paper bag, let alone a multi-level pointer issue in a PL/I program.
I had to chuckle at this one:
Looking at my network configuration ... and translating this into a human-readable Markdown file describing the network... It even generated an overview in an SVG file that was correct! My friend, we called this "systems analysis." We had a tool for it. It was called a pencil, a flowchart template, and a very large sheet of paper. The idea that a machine can "understand" context and generate a diagram is about as novel as putting wheels on a suitcase. We were doing this with CASE tools on DB2 workstations in 1985. The diagrams were uglier, sure, but they worked. You've just discovered documentation, son. Congratulations.
But the final, most telling line is this: "the more I know about a certain problem ... the better the result I get from an LLM." So let me get this straight. The tool that's supposed to help you works best when you already know the answer? That's not a copilot, that's a parrot. That's the most expensive rubber duck in history. It's a glorified autocomplete that only works if you type in precisely what it was trained on. You're not "vibe coding," you're just playing a very elaborate game of "Guess the Training Data."
Anyway, this has been a real trip down memory lane. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check on a tape rotation. It's a complex job that requires actual intelligence. Thanks for the blog post; I'll be sure to never read it again.