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A year ago, on my laptop, I started to use the newly introduced — and still very imperfect — agent mode of GitHub Copilot to push forward my private project, the Retro Build Tool (RBT). The project had stagnated for a long time, and it was AI that finally brought it back to life. Today I use just my Android phone and Claude Code with remote control, which talks to a mini PC that runs around the clock at my house. When I write it down like that, it sounds like a decade of progress, but it has been just twelve months. A typical ‘coding session’ now looks like this: I pull the phone out of my pocket, I read...

A few days ago, my colleague Adam Witkowski published an interesting article titled ‘Digital Orphans’. In it, he compares two approaches to authoring code: The ‘classic’ approach, where code is crafted by hand, and the ‘vibe coding’ approach, where a human simply instructs an AI agent to generate code via natural language prompts and usually does not even look ‘inside’. Adam uses the beautiful metaphor of the parent-child relationship, which is applicable to the relationship between a programmer and their code. This relationship is certainly broken when we ‘instruct’ AI to write and deploy something that works. AI-generated applications become ‘digital orphans’, meaning nobody feels truly responsible for them. This leads to nasty things such as security issues and legacy...

With Vibe Coding it’s the same as with Agile: a reasonable idea gets ruined by misunderstanding, and this gets worse as the hype continues. This may happen if an idea is applied blindly, or even forcibly, and the result is far from what was anticipated. Losses instead of profits, and so on. Is it still not too late? First, let’s try to understand what Vibe Coding really is. We can find an informal definition on Wikipedia. By Vibe Coding, we mean a completely different approach to coding: a chatbot-based approach rather than an assistant-based one. The developer no longer works with the code directly, but rather develops via a series of prompts, letting the GenAI agent provide the implementation. The...

When interviewing new candidates for the software architect position, I like to start with a few awkward questions, such as “What is architecture?”, “Who is an architect?” and “What do you do?”, before waiting for the ensuing moment of disbelief and long silence. Maybe some of them will try to beat the system by using these two rectangles and a barrel. Yes, I was there too. There are perhaps two reasonably correct answers to these questions. By “correct”, I mean “simple”, because a simple question deserves a simple answer. The first is that the architect is the most senior person on the team and knows about the things and how to avoid the traps. It’s just common sense. However, this...