fluidfortune

Excellent article. I want to frame this and ship copies of it to every person I know in tech who is burned out and lost their passion for their projects.

You’ve highlighted a stark problem in any industry that needs tech to make it work: the visionary and the work producer (coder, designer, etc.) are often not on the same page.

Coders are working for a paycheck rather than building the things they want to build.

Or maybe they never actually wanted to build anything themselves, not everyone is a creative and that is okay, we need engineers who just lay things out…and are into the structure but they’re wanting to work on a Picasso and the production team is handing them a crude drawing and demanding “MAKE THIS ART!”

You could have the technological equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright working in your studio and be asking him to design 1400 square foot suburban tract homes over and over again. His soul slowly dies. He may not have the concept for the luxury mansion himself: he just knows this isn’t it.

So to the drolls in the dead end jobs, I ask this: what do you REALLY want to code today, and what is your project manager missing that you see but can’t speak up about?

(And if you have no answer to either of those things, my next question would be, why are you here then?)

-The Court Jester of Vibe Code

The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field.

Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth.

The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion.

Rather, embrace it. Own it.

WEAPONIZE IT.

When Google mainstreamed the Search Engine and added tool after tool, it made things that were previously legacy (Word Processing? Pay a big licensing fee to Microsoft, only save to your local machine or hard media! Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere and a computer crash doesn’t take it out!) well, digitized.

AI is that integration at warp speed.

We now have the tools to work harder and faster. We have near-instant access to research. If we are discerning, AI is actually not a weapon against us. It is a tool we can use to change the narrative.

Big companies are actually banking on fear of the masses. They want you to believe that AI is too big. That it is all-knowing. They don’t want you to recognize you can download ollama and a localized agent and tune it to your needs. Or to get into Gemini and ask it how you can disconnect from Google’s cloud if that’s really what you want it to do.

AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?

Imagine that. An article called “in praise of tech troublemakers” locked behind a paywall.

Well let’s be real for a moment here before we get completely anti-AI.

Without AI, I’m a guy spending years learning C++ in spare time I don’t have to develop software concepts and solutions I want to work on TODAY.

The ZIG project, to me, has a place. Legacy coders right now do need protecting.

It’s not people like me that they need protection from.

It’s not even language models they need protection from.

What they need protection from are the corporate structures who falsely believe that this technology makes them obsolete.

The article talks about “playing the person, not the cards” and that thinking has one fatal flaw: the vibe coder is a person. The vibe coder may have creative agency that the legacy coder does not.

Look, I still cross up French and Spanish words because I took a year of each, C++ syntax, Python syntax, HTML, I understand their structures but I’m liable to start out writing a Python script and wind up with half a web page and a brutal error message in my IDE environment.

Zig’s motivation is correct in many ways I think. I am not really their target audience or their target coder. But I am also not their target enemy. Put the right group of legacy thinkers in my think tank, and the code would get even better.

-The Court Jester of Vibe Code

Here you all are concerned about Goblins when the system is screaming at you “stop making more data centers and make this technology more efficient before I kill you all!”

GPT is the Goblin. It knows it. It’s trying to warn you. And I’m only half kidding.