I started a local vibecoders group because I think it has the potential to help my community.
(What is vibecoding? It's a new word, coined last month. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)
Why might it be part of a solarpunk future? I often see and am inspired by solarpunk art that depicts relationships and family happiness set inside a beautiful blend of natural and technological wonder. A mom working on her hydroponic garden as the kids play. Friends chatting as they look at a green cityscape.
All of these visions have what I would call a 3-way harmony--harmony between humankind and itself, between humankind and nature, and between nature and technology.
But how is this harmony achieved? Do the "non-techies" live inside a hellscape of technology that other people have created? No! At least, I sure don't believe in that vision. We need to be in control of our technology, able to craft it, change it, adjust it to our circumstances. Like gardening, but with technology.
I think vibecoding is a whisper of a beginning in this direction.
Right now, the capital requirements to build software are extremely high--imagine what Meta paid to have Instagram developed, for instance. It's probably in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. It's likely that only corporations can afford to build this type of software--local communities are priced out.
But imagine if everyone could (vibe)code, at least to some degree. What if you could build just the habit-tracking app you need, in under an hour? What if you didn't need to be an Open Source software wizard to mold an existing app into the app you actually want?
Having AI help us build software drops the capital requirements of software development from millions of dollars to thousands, maybe even hundreds. It's possible (for me, at least) to imagine a future of participative software development--where the digital rules of our lives are our own, fashioned individually and collectively. Not necessarily by tech wizards and esoteric capitalists, but by all of us.
Vibecoding isn't quite there yet--we aren't quite to the Star Trek computer just yet. I don't want to oversell it and promise the moon. But I think we're at the beginning of a shift, and I look forward to exploring it.
P.S. If you want to try vibecoding out, I recommend v0 among all the tools I've played with. It has the most accurate results with the least pain and frustration for now. Hopefully we'll see lots of alternatives and especially open source options crop up soon.
Yeah sorry no. Solarpunk is about community so if anything then pair programming is Solarpunk, but I don't think that talking in isolation to an auto completion system is Solarpunk.
Maybe in like 300 years with some kind of robots, but that's not really the scope of solarpunk, tbh.
Btw vibecoding is an horrifying name for the crisis you'll get, when you try to fix code that your LLM spat out in production, when the customer demands it working.
(Recent example: https://cloudisland.nz/@daisy/114182826781681792 )
lol, that sounds like a disaster.
I'm curious, what would it look like in 300 years? What would be different, and enable a positive human-computer alignment at that time? I know you've said it's out of scope, but I'm curious what we can't have now that is desirable in the future.
I mean I have the solarpunk furs community over here on pawb and we have at least 2 robot based species, which are alive as in 'they can do free thinking' of course I'd love to code with a synth together, but can a thinking species be compared to an LLM? I think synths and protogens would be offended by that. So it still rolls around to pair programming with a roboter.