In 1779, the world's first major iron bridge opened over the River Severn in Shropshire, England. Its architect, Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, and builder Abraham Darby III faced a unique challenge: applying an entirely new material—cast iron—to bridge construction at unprecedented scale. While some structural theory existed by the 1770s, Pritchard relied heavily on carpentry methods,...
Author: Martin Treiber
Vibe coding is broken. Could Controlled Natural Language – CNL – save it?
Six months ago, “vibe coding” was supposed to change everything. Tell the AI what you want, sit back, and watch it generate working software. Andrej Karpathy, ex-Tesla and OpenAI, hyped it as the future: forget syntax, just describe your intent. The demos were intoxicating. Startups bragged about entire codebases written by GPT-like copilots. Prototypes spun...
The Rise of Agentic Vibe Coding: How Replit Agent 3 is Redefining Software Development
When AI researcher Andrej Karpathy floated the phrase “vibe coding” in a 2025 tweet, describing a style of programming where you “give in to the vibes” and focus on intent rather than syntax, he crystallized a cultural shift already underway. His post went viral, resonating with developers willing to let AI assistants take the wheel....
The New Unit Test: How LLM Evals Are Redefining Quality Assurance
Picture this: you've written a function that calculates the square root of a number. Feed it the input 16, and you'll get 4 back every single time—guaranteed. This predictability is the bedrock of traditional software testing, where unit tests verify that each piece of code behaves exactly as expected with surgical precision. Now imagine a...
The Specification Revolution: How AI is Flipping Software Development Upside Down
For decades, software development has followed a familiar pattern: gather requirements, write specifications, then build the code that makes those specs reality. The specification was scaffolding—useful for planning, essential for alignment, but ultimately discarded once the "real work" of coding began. But as AI coding assistants become more sophisticated, a new paradigm is emerging that...
In Defense of “Vibe Coding”: Why Your Personal Scripts Don’t Need to Pass Code Review
The term "vibe coding" doesn't appear in any computer science textbook, but ask any developer who's spent time with ChatGPT, Claude, or GitHub Copilot and they'll know exactly what you mean. It's that flow state where you're rapidly iterating with an AI assistant, throwing together solutions that work right now for the problem right in...
The Probabilistic Revolution: How AI is Making Software Engineering More Like “Real” Engineering
For decades, software engineers have endured a peculiar form of professional imposter syndrome. While their colleagues in mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering designed bridges that probably wouldn't collapse and factories that mostly wouldn't explode, software engineers worked in a deterministic paradise where 2+2 always equaled 4, functions returned predictable outputs, and bugs were logical puzzles...
AI Gets Its “I Know Kung Fu” Moment: Researchers Create Instant Expertise Downloads for Language Models
Remember that iconic scene in The Matrix where Neo gets martial arts expertise instantly downloaded into his brain, then opens his eyes and declares "I know kung fu"? Researchers have essentially created the AI equivalent of that moment. A team of scientists has developed Memory Decoder, a breakthrough technique that can instantly grant language models...
The Janitor’s Induction Machine: Rediscovering Peter Putnam’s Logic of Mind
December 1987. A bicycle goes down on East Main Street in Houma, Louisiana. The rider—a night janitor—dies. Two blocks away, his cramped apartment holds thousands of typed pages. Diagrams, memos, manuscripts—all sketching what he called a "calculus of mind." Here's the kicker: this janitor wasn't just any custodian. Peter Putnam had studied with John Archibald...
The Web’s Old Guard Isn’t Chasing AGI—They’re Building the New Infrastructure
Christina Wodtke, veteran product designer and Stanford lecturer, captured something profound recently: "The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995. They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto. NFTs got a collective eye roll. But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while...
