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The Combinatorial Bomb That Is “Vibe Coding”
Or, how the realpolitik of software engineering just makes the copy/pasters look very foolish indeed.
I’m a fan of maths, from quite an early age as it happens. My own salad days included a whole lot of watching Johnny Ball jump around on “Think of a Number” and a fair bit of dismay when ‘O’ Level maths teacher, Mr Steed, refused to accept that Block Transfer Computation was actually a valid mathematical field.
Well, it was the early 1980s after all. Mr Steed clearly didn’t envisage the possibilities around Stephen Wolfram’s (future) Writings, the possibility that spacetime was just a really, really big hypergraph, and we’d have so much information sloshing around the world and all instantly available to the powerful computers we carry around with us pretty much all of the time.
Numbers are cool, and while I didn’t perhaps have the opportunity, teenage levels of concentration, or depth of creativity for that matter, to really get into pure mathematics at the time — the 1980s boom in home computers was a perfect fit for what I preferred to do with my spare time and what my teenage mind could handle.
Nowadays I love the esoteric things — number theory, abstract algebra, and lots of calculus (amongst many other things I’ll never have the time to really understand). But some specific fields, for…
