I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I want to point out how badly the commercial software industry, particularly Microsoft in this case, has failed us such that an individual feels the need to do this. Don't know what to do instead though.
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@matt Yeah... personally I'd rather use something vibe coded than something intentionally coded to bloat my system while doubling as an omnipresent salesman I never asked for. If this works, heck yeah I'm gonna use it.
On the one hand, it's good that blind people are taking initiative to solve our own problems, rather than begging big tech companies and/or under-resourced open-source projects to give us what we need.
On the other hand, I still believe that relying heavily on an LLM to generate large volumes of code is dangerous, and that we don't fully understand the pitfalls.
@matt I have seen some people talking about the boom of writing accessibility game mods, positioning it as empowering because we are able to write a solution for our own needs rather than having to wait for a day that never comes. I find this to be extremely misguided. It's true that we are now able to do something that we couldn't before, but calling it a solution is super premature. We still want--and need--the industry to think about us when designing their apps. If we do the work for them, they'll just think "cool, we don't have to worry about this. Thx!" Relying on a small army of unemployed college students paying Anthropic $100/mo to do the work of a AAA studio, for free, is just not sustainable. It is a stunning lack of foresight.
@matt I think this is true of vibe coding or AI in general. That said, vibe coding has reduced the friction for many of having to struggle with some of the complexities of less than accessible code writing experiences while trying to learn.
@kellylford @matt Also I think it somewhat depends on what you're trying to do. I think it's very important to understand the concepts behind programming, and if code is given to you, you should be able to read and understand what is going on. That being said, an LLM used in moderation, e.g. auto complete, maybe giving it a few lines of code to look at and fix potential problems, etc., I don't see an issue with that. I agree that vibe coding can definitely get you into trouble, especially if you're working on big architectural stuff or anything involving the web.
@ZBennoui @kellylford @matt The big thing is that for decades, we've essentially been the beggars, not the choosers. Even in #openSource, often when you ask for an #accessibility enhancement you either get a "no, too hard" or "submit PR and then maybe lmao". With that pushback it makes sense that people have decided they've had enough of not being considered important enough and just making a tool yourself. Even well-established projects like #microsoft #windows, #apple #MacOS etc. have been steadily backsliding over the last decade so what's a person to do?
It absolutely means there's likely a lot of tools out there that may very well be doing things insecurely or inefficiently, and the developer might not even know. So now it becomes a responsibility question: do we blame the dev, who isn't a dev, for doing dev wrong, or the user for trusting what they feel is now their only/best option? THis is where accessibility negligence has taken us.
@matt I don't like vibe-coded anything, unless I know the person doing it is an experienced coder who is using AI to speed things up or help with the fundamentals of a new platform. It says a lot that I kind of want to try this new client. I won't, because I very much don't trust a vibe-coded app with my email, but I'm tempted.
@alexchapman @alexhall @matt at this point if that person can read code generated by AI and ensure it has no security holes, then it isn’t really vibe coding.
Vibe coding is generating code and not even looking at the code. Just build build build and not care what the code looks like because you just iterate based on features and have automated test (also vibe coded!) do the QA.
@matt I'd promote this email client, fuck the whole vibe coding fact of it, its a good client.
