An Abstraction Is Worth a Thousand Vibes
Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Markus Borg · IEEE Software · 2025
In the last column, we promised to return to one of the inevitable challenges that vibe coding leaves us with. At the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025, OpenAI’s Sean Grove claimed that whoever writes the specification is now the programmer since AI can take it from there. Sounds amazing, but what gets lost along the way? To explore this, I’m joined by Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, a researcher at XITASO and longtime expert on traceability. We’re sharing our thoughts on abstractions and why building without them is a recipe for collapse.—Markus Borg