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.
I think the pretty universal answer in all these comments is “no”- I think that’s fair but I’d add sone caveats.
There’s a lot of negative sentiments here around LLMs, which I agree with, but I think it’s easy to imagine some hypothetical future where LLMs existing without the current water/energy overuse, hallucinations or big companies stealing individuals work. Whether that future is likely or not, I think it’s possible.
The main reason vibe coding isn’t solarpunk is that, taken by itself, it’s not in any way related to ecological stewardship, anti-capitalist community building, or anything else that’s core to solarpunk. Vibe coding might or might not be part of some “cool techy future” in the same way as flying cars, robots, and floating cities but that’s not a reason to consider it as solarpunk.
If you’re into LLMs and solarpunk, instead of arguing that LLMs are solarpunk, you can make efforts to push them to being more solarpunk. How can LLMs support communities instead of coorporations? How can, through weights sharing and various optimisations, we make LLMs less damaging to the environment? Etc. That’d at least be a solarpunk way to go about LLMs, even if LLMs aren’t inherently solarpunk.