Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
[Bend just serves as a useful example of my general point regarding vibe-coding as it is recent, high-profile, and has aspects that make it easy to use as an example. I don’t know anything about the author’s history with designing languages or if they actually did consider the tradeoffs below and made what I think is a poor choice. Feel free to replace “the author” below with “a hypothetical author who could have created the same thing”.]
Bend 2 is being pitched as a language for the AI coding era: humans write “laws”, AI writes implementations and proofs, and the compiler checks that the proofs are sound. That all sounds quite impressive and I can see why someone would want a language that does that. There are actually a few major problems with this idea; however, that’s not what this article about. Instead I want to talk about how the Bend itself seems to have fallen in to a common trap with vibe-coding that I don’t see mentioned much.
Let’s start with a baseline of what Bend requires the developer to write for its demo on the home page: