Beyond Vibe Coding: The Artisan of the Day Is Colin DeCarlo.
Colin DeCarlo brings the calm perspective every developer needs when it comes to navigating the hype around AI development tools.
Colin is the Crew Chief at Vehikl, a software consultancy with over 75 team members that has been a Laravel Premier Partner for over a decade. With over a decade of professional experience, Colin is never put off by a good challenge and specializes in clean, maintainable code that's expressive and well-thought-out. He's also the creator behind AI-Driven Laravel, a course that helps developers master the integration of AI with Laravel applications.
This is his sixth Laracon presentation, and his approach to AI reflects his broader philosophy about technology: embrace the power, but stay in control. Similar to other Laravel Community members, Colin believes in working smarter, not just harder, and understanding your tools deeply before wielding them.
AI and You: Cutting Through the AI Hype
At Laracon US, [Colin delivered a presentation](ADD YT VIDEO) that transformed how developers think about AI coding assistance. Moving beyond the viral "vibe coding" trend, he provided a framework for understanding AI capabilities and using them effectively as pair programming partners.
Colin’s key highlights:
Understanding AI Model Benchmarks
- HumanEval: The original Python coding benchmark, now too easy for modern models to differentiate performance
- SWE-bench Verified: Real-world bug fixes from production Python projects with a single attempt to succeed
- Aider Polyglot: Multi-language editing tasks that mirror day-to-day development work, tracking both accuracy and cost
The Evolution from Hype to Reality
Colin traced the journey from copying code between IDEs and chat windows to today's integrated agentic workflows. He positioned this evolution like "Maslow's pyramid for AI" with vibe coding at the top as a powerful tool that requires human control.
AI as Your Chainsaw, Not Your Replacement
Drawing from Stephen Covey's "sharpening the saw" story, Colin positioned AI as the chainsaw developers should embrace: AI is powerful but requires skill and caution. He showed how Andre Karpathy's viral "vibe coding" tweet sparked both excitement and legitimate concerns, much like the Agile Manifesto did in 2001.
Practical AI Partnership Strategies
- Choose your mental gear: Ask mode for debugging, Edit mode for focused changes, Agent mode for complex multi-file work
- Set ground rules: Use instruction files to encode your preferences and project conventions
- Treat generated code as disposable: Don't fall into sunk cost fallacy: if it's not right, start over
- Use few-shot prompting: Show AI examples of your desired patterns for consistent refactoring
- Multi-agent workflows: Use one model to write code, another to review it, boosting accuracy by up to 20%
Colin's core insight resonated throughout the Laravel community: we're at the "peak of inflated expectations" in Gartner's AI hype cycle. This isn't the time to be hands-off with AI—it's the time to be completely hands-on and focused on what these tools are actually doing.
His practical advice reflected years of consultancy experience: AI can dramatically increase productivity, but like any powerful tool, it requires skill, judgment, and clear boundaries to use effectively. The future belongs to developers who learn to work with AI as sophisticated partners, not to those who either reject it entirely or accept everything blindly.
Colin concluded the talk with a promise: when Boost becomes available (spoiler alert: it already is, it will embody these principles natively, making intelligent AI partnership feel as natural as working with Eloquent.
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