If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C?

It may seem like a facetious or ironic question, but why stop with vibe coding? If we’re going to develop software with large language models, why not use C? Or, more specifically, why use a specific language? Here, Stephen Ramsey observes that programming languages are designed for human convenience, i.e., developer convenience. But if a large language model is generating the code, why generate a language that is essentially an intermediary that humans rarely have ever actually going to read?

This is the question that Brett Taylor asks in a podcast that we linked to a few months back. It’s one that really interests me. Just the other day, Geoff Huntley in another piece that we linked to talks about working with rather than against the grain of large language models. So, I think this fits into that way of thinking. If we are going to increasingly rely on large language models to do tasks for us, even if we restrict our focus to programming, it makes sense, it would seem, to find what they are best at rather than try to get them, as Geoff Huntley observes, to conform to approaches that humans have developed for our convenience.