AI is Coming to take our Jobs!

Somewhat a funny thing to write in my new editor of choice, Cursor. As I type, "AI is Coming" the AI suggests the rest of that sentence - is this something I should be worried about?

Either way I think we can say with confidence that AI has come, but it's not here to take our jobs, but we do need to know what it is here for.

LLMs as Compiler

As someone who nerds out on compilers I look at Vibe coding as effectively a very high level language - natural language - with a very advanced compiler. That compiler though is problematic so problematic that we do something that we would never do with a real compiler - we ignore the source code and only review the output.

Imagine if I told you that I'd built a new programming language, it compiles to Javascript but it's way more expressive and easier to write. However for people using my language I'm going to suggest that your normal workflow should be writing your programs in this language, compiling them to Javascript locally, and then checking the Javascript into your source control system. To any professional programmer this sounds absurd, but it's exactly what we do with LLMS right now. Imagine instead if we could trust that the AI would always give us the correct output for the prompt we gave it, imagine if we could run that AI cheaply and repeatedly, now instead of committing our source code we just commit our prompts - regenerate the whole application on every build. If we want to switch from React to Vue it's no different in terms of the scope of work as switching from a blue button to a red one.

The problem is that LLMs can't be the compiler of the future