Vibing Digital History | Jason A. Heppler

One thing I’ve been thinking about is a persistent critique—one I’ve expressed myself and think is completely valid—that code generated by Claude or Codex immediately becomes technical debt. That is, it’s tantamount to producing spaghetti or legacy code that you cannot understand because you did not write it (which, of course, is a similar concern I have about generative AI producing things like historiographical essays). But as my pal Lincoln Mullen just wrote, the barrier to entry for most things we do in digital history—building websites, creating maps, designing data visualizations, preparing data—can be reduced considerably. I’ve spent my career building these kinds of skills to do this kind of work, and now a machine can do them in a fraction of the time it takes me.1 Here’s an example.