There is no single definition of what a shell is or isn't.

Undoubtedly last week, I suffered a severe case of "AI blues" (for lack of a better description).

I have been doing some thinking, trying to distil my own thoughts on what aspects of vibecoding seem to irk me so much. Ultimately, it seems it is more about attitudes than anything else.

Increasingly, I am finding that other people's vibecoded work is my problem. I have been an active participant in OCaml's outreachy work for going on five years now, and a problem mentors have to face is deciding the appropriate amount of help to give to your intern when they come to you with questions. More than likely, you could answer with specifics and solve the problem at hand. However, this doesn't scale very well and doesn't help your intern learn where else they may look for answers (e.g. Dune's documentation, a project's README page, OCaml's package explorer, heck even just using some simple CLI tools!) or how they might go about debugging a certain problem.

LLMs, in my experience, make this problem worse. When they come up short, they can leave their programmer higher and drier than they would be had they hit a problem on their own. There is an inertia to understanding problems now that there's lots of code lying around. Turning to your colleagues has a few problems that it didn't before:

1. Your colleagues don't know whose understanding they are correcting: yours or the LLMs?

2. If it is the latter, there seems to me to be an exploitative quality to even asking for help until you yourself know what's going wrong.