The humble giraffe

Giraffes have something called the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN). It's an example of evolution leading to a design that was once efficient becoming less efficient over time.
The RLN once connected the brainstem to the larynx (voice box) in only a few centimeters. But as giraffes got longer and longer necks, the detour through the neck grew to over 4 meters.
As the world around the giraffe changed, a vestige of a time of shorter necks remained.

The giraffe is a codebase

Each gene is a line of code.
If the codebase is vibecoded, the evolutionary pressures are the tests the developer sets up (if they even do that) and the prompts they give to the LLM.
As projects grow and time passes, new constraints get added and old ones fizzle out.

Vibe vestiges

What gets left behind is code that once served a purpose but is now a vestige, one with no intelligent overseer, only reached by the pressures of evolution.
When we as programmers hand over our thinking to machines, we are setting up an evolutionary system in which fitness is solely defined by conformity to prompts.
Some lines will remain that no longer serve any purpose, some were once a good solution and now take a 4 meter detour.

If your goal is to create a codebase that looks like Margit the Fell Omen, try (blind) vibecoding!

Julian Noah Leser