Vibe coding to Chomksy: will linguistics pop off in a world full of prompting?

Like many developers, I’ve spent most of the past year vibe coding. Across the many tools I’ve tried, my workflow looks something like this: I prompt AI agents in natural-language and hope they make the edits I want. When it works, it feels like sorcery. When it fails, I’m left spelunking through probabilistic misfires, trying to reverse-engineer why the model chose a broken string-replace instead of the obvious refactor.

Written by Ayman Nadeem