Vibe Coders are Nepo-babies

Auditions

From 2010 to 2019 I went on probably 100-200 acting auditions for mostly stage plays, but also TV commercials and indie films. Auditions are very weird. Hours and hours of waiting around between a few stressful, exhilarating & occasionally mortifying moments.

Hang out long enough in any arts community and you'll hear complaints about certain producers or organizations that "always cast their friends," or "never open it up, fair and square to everybody" (sometimes these complaints are very loud and very self-righteous). There can be truth to these complaints, but I always found them a little missing-the-point because the reason producers don't hold open call auditions isn't some grand conspiracy but because running auditions are a logistical nightmare.

What you learn hanging out in the arts long enough is "getting in the room" (and knowing how to act like you belong there) is a skill in and of itself.

Nepo-babies

To be clear: I have no problem with nepo-babies. It honestly IMO makes a lot of sense that people who were raised in the performing arts are gonna have a leg up, not necessarily because they were explicitly given anything but because they just are gonna

1: know who to ask to even get into the audition &

2: be quicker studies for all the unwritten rules and norms of the audition process itself–and there are so many unwritten rules and norms.

Freshman year of college I knew a few kids who's parents were college professors. They knew without being told that it's good to attend office hours. Is that "unfair"? I guess. But is it sinister? I don't think so.

LLMs

I had a web app I deployed with LLMs, leaning on the aws command line tool & lots of screenshots.

I would not have been able to deploy it without LLM assistance, full stop.

I took it down because it was more expensive than I thought it would be (& considerably more than the LLM told me it would be!) to host.

It's a pretty funny problem. LLMs have fast-forwarded me into a precarious digital situation that I kinda have no business being in–I'm like the son of a big-time producer who can't sing but knew who to email, and suddenly I'm auditioning for Lalaland 2.

But!

Sometimes as an actor you "get in the room" and maybe you're only there because your friend told you who was organizing the audition and then you told a white lie in a cold email and you got a slot...and then you prepared yourself and you nailed it and you get the role.

Maybe if I use LLMs to light-speed-jump myself into some interesting but long-term untenable technical situation and I have fun and I learn something...maybe that's okay? Maybe I'm learning hard lessons about cloud computing years faster than I would have without LLMs, and maybe that's kinda cool? I really don't know.

Potential Heuristic for responsible LLM-use

My web app isn't hurting anyone, and I learned a bit deploying it. But if I had instead vibe-coded up some actual software, and blogged about it making promises on what it would do, that would be I think kinda irresponsible (and stressful for everyone).

If I'm using LLMs to waste other people's time or trust, to deceive or stretch promises on what's possible, maybe that's the line?

If you like to laugh: here's Fred Armison auditioning as a tap dancer without ever tap dancing before

(this was in my head the whole time as I thought thru the analogy)