I have applied to what I’ve been calling the “vibe coding workshop,” which is more officially known as the Agentic AI Peer-Mentoring Program. It’s an interesting initiative from CUNY’s Office of Library Services to teach CUNY librarians how to code with agentic AI.

To be fair, I suspect that most people who learn to code now and in the coming years will have a heavily AI-based education. From some perspectives, my experience of learning to code from books and StackOverflow is now becoming unusual and a bit quaint. I will not speculate or opine on which approach is better, but it is clear that they are very different.

What I wonder about most is how this will go for those librarians who are new to programming. My old-timey strategies may not help them much with their work. But will agentic approaches empower them to do inspiring things with code, in the same way that leaning programming languages did for prior generations of coders? Will it bring about that enervated excitement of building things that keeps you up at night? Will they obsess over figuring out that one very specific problem for days? I hope so, but we will see.