Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

March, 21 2026

A sufficiently detailed spec is code begins with this lovely comic:

There is a profound tension here: english specifications intuitively feel precise until you learn better from bitter experience. (It's all in that facial expression of the last frame.)

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."

– Bertrand Russel

Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. AI helps you with this, because it – increasingly instantly and well – turns English into running code. You can then react to it – "move the button there; make it bluer" – to get incrementally more precise about what you want.

This is why "vibe coding" is such a perfect phraseology: you stay operating at the level of your English-level vibes while reacting to the AI-created artifacts that help you sharpen your thinking.

But, vibe coding gives the illusion that your vibes are precise abstractions. They will feel this way right up until they leak, which will happen when you add enough features or get enough scale. Unexpected behaviors (bugs) that emerge from lower levels of abstraction that you don't understand will sneak up on you and wreck your whole day.

This was Dan Shipper's experience when his vibe-coded text-editor app went viral, and then went down. As it turns out, "live collaboration is just insanely hard."

"Live collaboration" intuitively feels like a perfectly precise specification. We've all used Google Docs, Notion, etc so it feels precisely spec'd. It's incredibly hard a priori to see what this is not the case.

The only reason that I personally know otherwise is that I tried to add a collaborative text editor to a product I was working on 10 years ago, and it was an unexpected nightmare of complexity. Complexity can be incredibly boring, unpleasant to think about, and hard to remember all the details and edge cases.

But, this isn't the end of the story either. We are blessed with an extremely powerful tool to master complexity. There is a fundamental limit in the human brain. We can only think of 7 (plus or minus 2) things at a time. So the only way to think about more than 7 things is to compress multiple things into a single thing. Happily, we can do this recursively, indefinitely, which is why humans can master unlimited complexity. That compression step is called abstraction.

"The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."

— Edsger Dijkstra

This is the best part of programming: coming up with increasingly good abstractions to help us master complexities. So yes, collaborative text editors are fundamentally complex, but that just means that we're continually in search of better abstractions to help us master complexities, like ReactJS or TailwindCSS did in their respective domains.

But let's play this out 1, 2, 5, 10, 100 years. AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates. It may seem like an AGI world is a vibe world. If anyone can afford 100 Karpathy-level geniuses for $1000 / month, why ever trouble yourself with any troublesome details?

This is clearly only something you'd think in the abstract, before this technology arrived. If you told me that I had access to that level of intelligence, there is zero part of me that is going to use it to ship more slop. Of course not.

I think we're confused because we (incorrectly) think that code is only for the software it produces. It's only partly about that. The code itself is also a centrally important artifact. When done right, it's poetry.

When we have AGI, the very first things we will use it on will be our hardest abstraction problems. We will use it to help us make better abstractions so that we can better understand and master complexity. You might think the need for good code goes away as AIs get smarter, but that's like using ChatGPT to write more slop. When we get AGI, we will use them to make better abstractions.

It seems like 99% of society has agreed that code is dead. This is so sad. It's the same as thinking storytelling is dead at the invention of the printing press. No you dummies, code is just getting started. AI is going to be such a boon for coding.

Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve.

– Edsger W. Dijkstra