A Media Tetrad for Claude Code

Claude Code has leap frogged ChatGPT to become the synecdoche for vibe coding. It lets novices construct complex apps in a matter of hours and leaves professional programmers stammering about emergent complexity in large code bases to cope with their own obsolescence.

As I was reading about social media’s reversal of literate culture towards digital orality, I thought about Claude Code. This may be an occupational hazard of talking to Claude all day; nonetheless, I think vibe-coding follows a similar trend of new-medium-induced reversal.

Writing detaches ideas from authors. It places both the writer and the reader in a world of abstractions that require contemplation. The writer has to linearly, and logically lay out their ideas. In oral culture, ideas are not separated from their speakers. Orality is immersive and spontaneous. People see ideas through the lens of their relationship to the speaker and react in turn. And conversations are synchronous; there’s no natural delay for contemplation.

There are resonances with vibe coding on a couple of levels. I want to describe them in the framework of the media tetrad. I don’t want this to be interpreted as a polemic. I love Claude Code. But all media provide new capabilities, and simultaneously have some counter-productive or at least counter-intuitive effects when pushed to the extreme. With that throat clearing… Claude Code

enhances:

The vibe coder can produce software without a low-level understanding of what the computer will do with it. The product designer can push to production without the frontend engineer. And the product manager can produce designs without the designer.

This fundamentally enhances the user’s ability to produce software.

obsolesces:

It obsolesces software engineering as a craft. As it becomes more powerful, it reduces the value of knowing programming syntax, design patterns, etc.

retrieves:

Claude Code retrieves the power of the generalist thinker. Technical expertise becomes less valuable than “taste” and “agency”. It’s the death knell for the age of the nerd. It’s the opening scene of Silicon Valley played in reverse. They can go back to where they belong: in lockers and dingy back-offices.

reverses:

The friction and mental strain of expressing a high-level goal in the syntax of a programming language is the strain of precisely defining what you want to happen. It’s the same thing that makes writing hard. You have some brilliant idea but you just can’t express it— logically, clearly, linearly, so that someone else can pick up the page and understand it. In programming, that someone else is the computer.

Every layer of abstraction in programming— from assembly code to Python to Claude code— increases the power of the user to quickly churn out code to achieve a goal while introducing ambiguity in precisely what the code should accomplish. So taken to its extreme, natural language programming reverses code into ill-defined, unmaintainable slop.