GoKawiilThe Tower Keeps Rising
I feel that some vibecoded software changes somewhat randomly and unexpectedly. That made me think about Bruegel’s “The Tower of Babel” which shows an already quite chaotic depiction of the Tower of Babel. The story is usually told as one about pride and ambition and ultimately why people no longer speak the same language. But it is also a story about the unity that makes technological progress work.
The text begins with a technology upgrade:
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
They use it for a civilizational project:
let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven
But when God assesses the situation the bricks are not what concern him:
the people is one, and they have all one language, […] and now nothing will be restrained from them.
The source of their power is coordination. They share a language and with that shared language they can combine their work into something no one of them could build alone. God does not take away the bricks or their knowledge of how to make them. He takes away their ability to understand one another, and construction stops.
There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.
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