Is Vibe Coding the New Ransom Note?
This morning I’ve been having a flash back to when the Mac + LaserWriter + PostScript + PageMaker combo suddenly put ‘professional grade’ typesetting and layout tools within reach in the mid-1990s.
Non-designers could pick any font, size, and layout, which led to the “ransom note effect”: too many clashing typefaces and chaotic layouts just because the tools made it easy.
Professional designers didn’t disappear; instead, their value shifted to knowing when not to use all the options, enforcing hierarchy, rhythm and restraint.
The result was a huge expansion in volume (newsletters, flyers, zines) plus a visible layer of amateurish work that made good design more distinctive.
Flash forward to today (early 2026) were generative AI assistants now let almost anyone produce syntactically correct, plausibly structured code very fast, massively increasing volume and velocity.
That same ease produces “AI slop” : code that complies and looks fine but is over-verbose, fragile, poorly factored, or subtly wrong, especially when users accept suggestions uncritically.
Experienced engineers end up cleaning up anti-patterns, hidden bugs, and unnecessary complexity, much like seasoned designers had to fix ransom note layout from early desktop publishing.
In both cases you get ‘democratized output’, but also technical debt and a stronger need for people who understand architecture, testing and constraints.
There are important differences as well:
- Stakes: Ugly flyers waste paper; ugly code can create outages, security holes, and compounding technical debt, so the cost curve is steeper for software.
- Opacity: Bad design is visible to lay people; bad architecture in code is invisible until it fails under load or change, which makes slop harder to detect early.
- Feedback loop: AI tools are starting to train on AI-generated content, so slop can reinforce itself; by contrast, fonts and layout tools didn’t '“learn” from user junk.
tl;DR : early Desktop Publishing tricked people into thinking fonts = design; early AI coding is tricking people into thinking “it runs” = engineering.