“troll” once meant someone deliberately setting out to get a negative emotional response from people on the internet. Now it can still mean that, but also “someone who is disagreeable” and “someone I have a negative emotional response to”.
Words with a negative valence I think always risk this semantic drift, and hence “vibecoding” moved from “generating code using AI without looking at it” (which to many programmers is quite negative) to “any application of AI for software development”. “Slop” started as low quality AI generated content, and now it just means anything generated by AI.
It makes sense that we’ve been speedrunning this, given the strong negative feelings enough people have about anything AI. If you think any application of AI is bad, of course everything is slop.
“Vibecoding” now covers this vast gray area between not looking at the code at all to reviewing the shape, to reviewing every line as written by AI. That’s weird, but I think it’s the semantic shift again.
I think we need new words to express the difference that are a bit more resilient against semantic drift. A word that expresses strong engagement with code that’s developed using AI, even though doing so has cognitive friction, to express what people do rather than don’t do. Then one may still reject all of it, but we will have words to distinguish between a case where people engage with code with an engineering perspective versus not at all.
P.S. Before AI, almost nobody looked at all the code a project uses, because we reuse libraries and frameworks and programming language implementations and operating systems. For many projects moreover it’s always been so that not everybody on a team reads every single line that’s actually in the project’s repository. The difference is that all this code had a human provenance, not that people read every single line.
“troll” once meant someone deliberately setting out to get a negative emotional response from people on the internet. Now it can still mean that, but also “someone who is disagreeable” and “someone I have a negative emotional response to”.
Words with a negative valence I think always risk this semantic drift, and hence “vibecoding” moved from “generating code using AI without looking at it” (which to many programmers is quite negative) to “any application of AI for software development”. “Slop” started as low quality AI generated content, and now it just means anything generated by AI.
It makes sense that we’ve been speedrunning this, given the strong negative feelings enough people have about anything AI. If you think any application of AI is bad, of course everything is slop.
“Vibecoding” now covers this vast gray area between not looking at the code at all to reviewing the shape, to reviewing every line as written by AI. That’s weird, but I think it’s the semantic shift again.
I think we need new words to express the difference that are a bit more resilient against semantic drift. A word that expresses strong engagement with code that’s developed using AI, even though doing so has cognitive friction, to express what people do rather than don’t do. Then one may still reject all of it, but we will have words to distinguish between a case where people engage with code with an engineering perspective versus not at all.
P.S. Before AI, almost nobody looked at all the code a project uses, because we reuse libraries and frameworks and programming language implementations and operating systems. For many projects moreover it’s always been so that not everybody on a team reads every single line that’s actually in the project’s repository. The difference is that all this code had a human provenance, not that people read every single line.
score 1 · canonical