Salesforce pickin' up good vibrations Salesforce is bringing "vibe coding" to enterprise customers through a service called Agentforce Vibes - and it may not be as troubling as it sounds. Dan Fernandez, VP of product for developer services at Salesforce, acknowledges the elephant in the room by distancing what Salesforce has in mind from the popular conception of …
"The idea, she explained, is that business users, rather than developers, can jumpstart the development process, and once the proof-of-concept application has taken shape, developers can then add refinements. "
Translation : some stupid PHB can cobble together one input screen, then hand over his grand idea to the dev team which will have to work its ass off to make a sloppy idea into reality. And they'll have to make it work because His Manglement will point to his abortion of an idea and say "but it works here !".
Vibe coding was a concept that resonated with managers and was despised by developers. It continues to be useful as a term because it makes clear who actually understands that software engineering requires a focus on engineering. Those who use the term either work in sales, marketing or management.
Vibe coding is the latest rehash of the low-code/no-code ideas of the past, that all miserably failed or were confined to areas where the cannot do that much damage (e.g. MS Office VBA).
The only difference introduced by Vibe Coding is that you now literally do not need to understand anything about the complexities of your environment, but can have the machine generate code anyway. What the effect and consequences of that code is, is often unclear to the end-user, especially if this code is added to existing environments of which neither the user nor the AI have a full context, but hey, they have created code that does something.
It can in fact be likened to Dunning-Kruger Syndrome: The less you actually know, the more power you assume you gain by "vibe coding" and the less you can estimate the risks your "results" pose.
Letting people "work" this way on a shop floor, in a chemical plant or a in mechanic workshop would lead to injury and death.
In IT it will probably "only" lead to wasted hours, lost data, security leaks and downtimes. At least in most cases.
Vibe Coding is a Dangerous Fantasy
“.. there’s a growing and dangerous fantasy that technical knowledge is optional in the new AI-powered world.”
I discovered last year on a forensic audit of a legal matter, that anyone full-using salesforce is breaching most countries' data protection laws, eg GPDR.
I also discovered their sysadmin team is either sloppy or overworked.
But that at least some of them might also retain a {oldskool} hacker's sense of humour. Eg San Francisco servers self-geolocating to Frisco, Indiana. Could be cockup. Could be joke.
I'm leaning to joke because the particular building nominated is an isolated shack thing that looks like an overfed outhouse.
