You Can't 'Vibe Code' Blockchain Applications

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]What's going on guys? This is James Allen.

[00:00:04]I am recording this on Thursday, May 7th, 2026.

[00:00:10]Not too long ago, a few friends of mine through a hackathon in Minneapolis, uh they started a organization, a company called Origin House, and their goal is to foster the tech community in Minneapolis, and they threw this very successful hackathon.

[00:00:27]And since the people who threw it knew me, uh they wanted me to show up and, you know, talk to some of the participants because these are young coders uh put putting together applications, and they see me as an OG, so they're like, "Hey, come to the hackathon, show face, talk to some of the teams, uh you know, see what's going on." And of course, um I took their offer. Shout out to Sammy and AJ, by the way. Uh Origin House, they're going to take over the tech industry in Minneapolis, so shout out to them.

[00:00:56]Anyway, when I went to the hackathon, there were some things I liked and there were some things I didn't like. I'll start with what I liked. Um I definitely like how diverse the people were.

[00:01:08]Um when I was in my early 20s and going to hackathons, um they weren't that diverse.

[00:01:14]So, it was it was very pleasant to see people of all backgrounds there. Um so, I really like that a lot. I also like seeing the teams work collaboratively.

[00:01:25]Um if if you're my age, you know how difficult it is to get people to work together because people have egos, they get petty.

[00:01:33]Uh so, sometimes it's really hard to get people to work together in harmony. So, seeing these kids uh put their minds together and collaborate to create a product was really um was really refreshing. So, this is what I liked. Now, in terms of what I didn't like, what I didn't like was that virtually all the participants there were using vibe coding to produce their product.

[00:01:55]Right? That that's That shocked me. Like I didn't expect that because again, when I was in my early 20s, if you show up at a hackathon, be prepared to code the app with your hands, right? And your brain. So, to to show up and see a bunch of people use vibe coding to create products, I was a little bit surprised. But of course, I didn't say anything because you know, I didn't want to be rude or have bad manners and say, "Oh, you know, when when when I was your age, right?" I don't want to be that idiot old guy who's who who sounds just stupid, right?

[00:02:27]So, uh I kept decent manners and didn't make any remark on that. But now that we're here on uh you know, YouTube, I can talk about it, especially since uh Internet Computer Protocol uh recently tried to push uh a generative AI product very similar to what these kids were using at the hackathon, and I'm talking about Caffeine AI.

[00:02:50]And I have I have never used Caffeine AI before. Uh and nor have I ever interacted with anyone who used vibe coding uh because the people I know are real engineers, as you can imagine, right?

[00:03:04]So, this was my first time actually interacting with people who use vibe coding. So, uh I want to share my impression I've got from this experience and related to Internet Computer because uh I do think um the observations I've made there are pertinent. Now, after I've talked to uh a few kids and they showed me their product, and I'm not going to lie, I was impressed by some of the products they were able to put together uh using vibe coding. I I literally felt the world shifting under my feet for a bit because um again, in my early 20s, when I first started to learn how to code, I started with Objective-C. Uh it was very hard to put together any kind of software, right? Um uh it was very hard, very clunky to write code, right? Because you have to have like your header file, you have to have like a implementation file, you have to declare all your properties up front before you write the logic. You have to do your own garbage handling.

[00:03:56]You have to serialize and deserialize the data yourself, right? So, it was very hard to to to do any kind of like application in the past, you know, you know, using Objective-C. So, watching these guys put together apps using vibe coding, that looks pretty impressive.

[00:04:13]Really felt like the world was shifting under my feet for a little bit because I knew how much skill it took to put something like that together back then.

[00:04:20]Now, I asked one of the players who showed me this very impressive app. I asked cuz I was genuinely curious. So, I asked him, "What does your data model look like for this product?"

[00:04:32]And he froze.

[00:04:34]He couldn't answer.

[00:04:36]Right? And when the fact that he couldn't answer that simple question surprised me, right? Because I even though he's vibe coding this thing, I thought he would know what his data models look like. Because like guys, I've never interacted with anyone who vibe coded before. So, this is this was a learning experience for me, too.

[00:04:54]So, when I asked him, "What does your data model look like?" and he couldn't answer, that's when I realized this guy had no idea what data he was persisting to the database.

[00:05:04]Right? Now, in a cloud computing environment, that's fine, right? You could put together an app that's, you know, that you barely understand, right?

[00:05:12]And as long as people are interacting with the front end, that's fine because cloud computing is very cheap, right?

[00:05:19]Traditional cloud infrastructure is very cheap.

[00:05:21]You could get something like that up running for free.

[00:05:24]That's not the same situation for a blockchain database, however, right?

[00:05:27]Because think about it.

[00:05:29]Blockchain databases are orders of magnitudes more expensive than traditional databases. You guys have to acknowledge that. This is why many of them have security cliffs.

[00:05:37]Because a blockchain database is enormously more expensive to run than a regular database, right?

[00:05:44]All of them are facing security cliffs.

[00:05:46]In fact, the only reason why you don't see that these databases are bleeding money so much is because they're subsidized, right? Internet computer I mean Dfinity is subsidizing the node operators that's running the network, right? But if Dfinity wasn't subsidizing these node operators, you would see the cost of running a blockchain database and you would see it is a magnitude orders of magnitudes more expensive than a traditional cloud infrastructure. And why is a blockchain database so much more expensive? It is because every computer is checking each other's work, right?

[00:06:19]When a computer update the state of a data on a blockchain network, the other computers don't just copy it, right?

[00:06:26]They re-execute the logic to make sure that they're arriving at the same state before they are updated, right? So this is what's what consensus is all about.

[00:06:34]Every computer is checking to see if they're arriving at the same result.

[00:06:39]If you remember, blockchain is a self-auditing ledger, right? So because it is a self-auditing ledger, computers don't just copy each other. They re-execute each other's work to make sure that they are arriving at the same state.

[00:06:53]Great, because you can't double spend, you can't corrupt, you know, um a transaction that had that has happened in the past. It's great for that kind of stuff, but it comes at a cost. It is orders of magnitudes more expensive to run in a traditional cloud infrastructure. This is because every computer is checking each other's work to make sure that they are arriving at the same state. So far, so good. Now, the problem comes when if someone is using generative AI to deploy applications to the blocks to the blockchain, and they don't even know what their state look like, right? Like I want you to imagine like how silly that is. These people don't even understand what state they're persisting across canister upgrades, right? So, what is the blockchain spending so much energy and resources pro- then, right? These people don't even know what the state looks like. These people don't even know what data is worth this enormous cost of protecting, right? And most data are not worth protecting at this enormous cost. Only few data like money and high valuable assets, right? This is why you don't need to have apps fully on chain because most of the data and most of the code that an application has is not worth the cost of protecting on the blockchain. This is why you only put the high value high high value data and high value logic on the blockchain, right? But the people who are vibe coding, they are so blind to the underlying mechanics because they can't they don't even know what like a data model is, right? And the kid I asked this question studied computer science, right? I want you to think about all the other people who are vibe coding who didn't even study computer science, right? They have no idea what state is. They have no idea what state they're persisting. They have no idea if there's if there's even a state change during a particular upgrade, right?

[00:08:48]Completely blind to the underlying mechanics. So, what is the blockchain spending all this enormous energy protecting?

[00:08:57]Nothing.

[00:08:58]>> [laughter] >> Nothing. So, again, this kind of vibe coding approach is perfect in a cloud environment where computing is cheap, but in a blockchain environment where um computing is extremely expensive, it's orders of magnitude more expensive, and you're spending all this energy to protect valuable state to make sure that the state stays the same, right?

[00:09:21]If the person doesn't understand what the state look like, they really have no business deploying things to the blockchain. And this brings me to my final point. Um I really think caffeine AI should just just just be removed altogether, right? I was looking at the website earlier today to see if it's still up, and it is, you know, um you could still create websites using Prop and Deploy to Internet Computer. And uh if if you look at like the app examples that they have, cuz they have examples of featured apps or something like that, you'll see blogs, you'll see landing pages, uh you'll see like finders, like low-value stuff, right? Not only these applications are low-value, the people that built them have no idea what state what the state looks like on a blockchain. So, guys, my point my point is I really don't think um vibe coding has any business on a distributed ledger. Uh it's perfect for cloud computing infrastructure, but on a distributed ledger where you're spending a lot of money protecting state that you deem very valuable, unless a person know what that state looks like and it's clear why that state is so valuable and worth investing this enormous amount of energy, we probably shouldn't include it. I understand that Dom, he wants to bring people to the ecosystem, so this is why he uh created Caffeine AI to bring the newbies to the blockchain, but what he perhaps needs to understand is that newbies have no business building blockchain applications.

[00:10:55]I'm going to say that one more time, newbies have no business building blockchain applications. So, I hope you, the Internet Computer ecosystem, take this to heart. I'm not trying to diss you guys, but we have to get realistic on what makes sense, what is economical, and not embarrass our ourselves as a protocol. I also think vibe coding has a bad trend in the industry overall, right? Because just like if you look at construction, um uh when you look at old Masonic architecture, they were more detailed, they had more character, they had more craftsmanship, they had more style, right? They were more firm, they lasted longer as opposed to new construction today.

[00:11:37]They look generic, they're flimsy.

[00:11:40]Many of the new homes don't even last the mortgage. What's happening with construction is that the builders who are erecting these houses, they don't value craftsmanship as much, right?

[00:11:52]They're becoming increasingly reliant on technology to build these houses and these houses are looking more flat, more more sterile, less character, more flimsy. They're falling apart. Not so long ago Aston Martin put up a building in Miami and they're already getting sued because the building is starts crumbling and I know it's because it's poor craftsmanship, right? You know, the building is barely a year a year old and it's getting lawsuits already. Why? It's because the construction is made so poorly and why is the construction made so poorly? Builders are not taking their craft seriously anymore and I think the same thing is happening with vibe coding. It might actually destroy our software industry. In either case, whether you agree with it or not, we could all see that this has no business on a blockchain. So I really recommend Dfinity to just quietly dispose of Caffeine AI because in the future other protocols will look at this and it won't look good for us as a community.

[00:12:48]In any case, my misfits, that's all I have for you in this episode. You know what to do. Don't forget to put to press that like button and support me on Patreon. I'll see you next time.