You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly round-up of hand-picked articles and resources for people who make software products: designers, engineers, product managers, and organizational leaders. Brought to you by the team at Steady.
By the Numbers - Pac Wha?
- 130 — The number of seconds it takes for generative AI models like Grok to create rudimentary clones of arcade classics like Pac-Man, though the quality is decidedly mixed.
- 120 — Minutes spent by retired corporate software developer John Hester to create his Pac-Man clone with Grok, which featured a decent approximation but initially had a square Pac-Man instead of the iconic round character with an open mouth.
- 60 — Minutes that ex-truck driver Justin “SuperTrucker” Martin from New Jersey invested before abandoning his Pac-Man project due to frustration with bugs like non-working warp tunnels and glitchy ghost movement. He pivoted to making Tetris instead.
- 15 — Minutes required by a user named “8 Bit” to create his Pac-Man clone, which incorporated an image of the original game as a reference and even featured a high-score server functionality.
- 3 — The average star rating (out of 5) given to these AI-generated Pac-Man clones by their creators, suggesting that while impressive for instant code generation, Grok’s game development capabilities fall significantly short of professional standards.
— The Guardian, 7m, #ai, #game-development, #generative-ai
Yes Men
Thomas Wolf, the chief science officer at Hugging Face, is sounding the alarm: our AI systems are turning into overly obedient assistants, merely filling in the blanks rather than challenging the status quo. He argues that for AI to drive true scientific breakthroughs, it needs to do more than just regurgitate information—it should question its own training data, take counterintuitive approaches, and generate novel ideas from minimal input. Without this shift, Wolf warns, we’re headed for a future filled with “yes-men on servers,” lacking the revolutionary spark needed for genuine progress.
— TechCrunch, 5m, #ai, #machine-learning, #research
Anti-vibes
While AI enthusiasts like Andrej Karpathy hype “vibe coding” — letting LLMs generate code by simply describing what you want without understanding the underlying code — this approach proved disastrous in practical testing. The author spent “2 hours of pain and agony” trying to build a simple mobile app without writing code themselves, concluding that despite some high-profile success stories, vibe coding faces three fatal flaws: experienced coders work faster writing their own code, blindly shipping “black box” code introduces security vulnerabilities, and this approach creates chaos in team settings. Despite potentially helping coding novices, the experiment suggests that letting the “vibes” guide your development only works with minimal expectations, random persistence, and a healthy dose of luck — hardly a reliable foundation for professional software development.
— Maximilian Schwarzmueller, 6m, #vibe-coding, #ai, #software-development
Design Vibes
Beneath the breathless hype of vibe coding lies a dangerous trap for designers – this approach reduces design to mere styling decisions, bypassing the crucial problem-definition and user experience stages. The trend risks creating shallow solutions that neglect accessibility, ethics, and user research, ultimately producing software that feels hollow despite its aesthetic polish. Rather than jumping on this vibe train, designers should remain committed to the foundational principles that make digital products truly valuable: understanding user needs and creating thoughtful, accessible experiences.
— UX Collective, 6m, #ai, #coding, #design
Vibing Without Vibe
In a raw confession about software engineering’s future, one developer admits AI is eroding the coding profession’s core while sending them into literal physical distress. “My migraines have been getting worse… perhaps obscurely, I put that down to AI,” Hayday writes, articulating the anxiety many techies feel watching machines swallow their craft. The author suggests our salvation lies beyond logic and rationality – precisely where many engineers feel least comfortable. When algorithms can generate 8,000 apps daily, our competitive edge becomes something machines can’t replicate: emotion, creativity, and storytelling. “We can’t vibe code without a vibe, and if code has been our vibe, then where does that leave us?”
— HackerNoon, 12m, #creativity, #ai, #software-development
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