A game changer or Silicon Valley’s latest brain fart
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This all sounds hopeful, even magical. But Dorsey’s app frenzy encapsulates many of the problems in Silicon Valley. Vibe coding seems to be largely about solving problems that don’t exist and then charging users $4.99 a month for the privilege of accessing a tech kid’s brain fart.
Now this trend is spreading beyond application development. Microsoft is investing heavily in what it calls “live work” and bringing the same prompt-based approach to its Office apps.
The company’s new Agent Mode in Excel and Word, along with the Office Agent powered by Anthropic models, promises to create complex spreadsheets, documents, and PowerPoint presentations from simple chatbot prompts. Microsoft is literally marketing its ability to “deliver the work of a world-class consultant in minutes.”
If this sounds like a red flag to you, you’re not alone. The same impulse that drives jitter coding—racing to reveal something with minimal human supervision—is now applied to the documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that support businesses around the world. And Microsoft admits that Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of only 57.2 percent, well below human accuracy of 71.3 percent. This is not a reassuring margin of error when dealing with business-critical data.
It’s about racing to get something out, no matter how rushed or how little demanding it is, and then taking the time to fix mistakes (if you even bother to fix them). Vibe coding lacks security requirements or rigorous testing, which are normally important aspects of the development process.
Vibe coding is a new trend where engineers use artificial intelligence and natural language to independently create applications.Credit: Bloomberg
Take Dorsey’s other app, Bitchat. One of the main points of difference is that it must be private and secure. Coders figured out how to impersonate other users within days of launch; This was a pretty big security vulnerability.
We have learned the hard way many times that we cannot trust Silicon Valley to do the right thing when left to its own devices. This is even more true for applications created by AI.
For example, how can an application developer be trusted to introduce a security vulnerability into an application that a human did not code? And when Microsoft describes its Excel features as “the work of a first-year consultant,” should we really be celebrating the automation of critical business documents by AI that performs worse than humans?
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Both Australian and global regulators already have their hands full trying to stamp out some of the tech industry’s worst mistakes. The Albanian government’s social media ban on young people is an attempt to reverse the harmful psychological and social effects of platforms that have long been proven to harm young people’s body image and self-worth.
The problem here isn’t Jack Dorsey himself or Microsoft. It’s fair to say that the soft-spoken emperor is more thoughtful and considerate than many of his counterparts in Palo Alto, who are more interested in raw power and increasing daily active users than security. And Microsoft has taken a more gradual approach to AI in Excel, given the critical business data it processes.
But “jibe-coding” an application and haphazardly making it available to the world without the usual checks, tests, or negotiations is a recipe for disaster. And extending this philosophy to “live work,” where AI constitutes the true content of our professional output, raises the bar even higher.
Jack Dorsey may not be as cocky as some others, but his “cool work” plans should give us pause.Credit: Getty
This repeatedly speaks to the general frivolity of the Vale’s attitude towards its own power.
What we actually need from this ultra-rich and mega-powerful minority is a shift away from recklessness and negligence and towards practices and technologies that serve us rather than distract or, worse, prey on us.
Currently, we can rely on artificial intelligence to perform mundane, mundane tasks that will give us the opportunity to do more interesting things. But coding our apps with jitter or working with dither in our spreadsheets and presentations on Sunday or any other day is not the solution.
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