BENGALURU — A Bengaluru-based software engineer, who once believed artificial intelligence would save humanity from Excel sheets and Jira tickets, has now declared OpenAI’s code generation tool "barely smarter than his dog, Bruno, who at least doesn’t hallucinate syntax errors."
Speaking to FD Staff on the condition that we buy him filter coffee and not report this to his manager at 3:17 a.m. IST, Prakash Iyer, 29, launched into a philosophical rant about the sorry state of "Vibe Code" — a term apparently created by developers who believed giving your code a positive aura might stop it from throwing fatal exceptions.
“The whole thing is a scam,” said Iyer, surrounded by three monitors, two energy drink cans, and a poster of Lord Hanuman hacking the Matrix. “OpenAI promised it’d write code like a senior dev, but all I see is an overpaid intern on LSD. You give it a problem, and it gives you vibes. Pure. Unfiltered. Vibes. But then comes the Vibe Debugging.”
Vibe Debugging, according to Iyer, is the ancient Indian art of interpreting AI’s transcendental nonsense into something that doesn’t crash on line 14. “It's like translating the Upanishads into JavaScript. Nothing makes sense, but somehow you feel more spiritually aligned with your tech debt.”
Syntax Errors and Sanskrit Verses
The AI’s coding responses, which once dazzled tech bros and TEDx speakers, now resemble the equivalent of asking your astrologer to configure a Kubernetes cluster. “It’ll be like: ‘Here’s a Python function that does what you asked… unless Mercury is retrograde.’ Then suddenly your API returns chai instead of JSON,” Iyer said, pointing to a bug report simply titled “WTF is this.”
“Yesterday it wrote a React component inside a Rust macro and asked me to ‘trust the process.’ Trust? Bro, I don’t even trust my food delivery ETA anymore.”
OpenAI’s new development assistant, dubbed “DevaGPT” in India, was marketed with the tagline “Code with Confidence, Deploy with Devotion.” But engineers on the ground report hallucinated imports, recursive loops that may have achieved sentience, and unexplained appearances of console.log("namaste") in mission-critical banking code.
FD Staff spoke to another techie, Arushi Mehta, who added: “I asked it to write a secure login page, it created a meditation app. Like, full chakra alignment and everything. The worst part? It still had SQL injection vulnerabilities.”
One With the Bug, One With the Cosmos
Sources within the Indian developer ecosystem describe a strange, almost spiritual relationship forming between engineers and their broken AI-generated code. “Debugging has become a form of self-discovery,” said Rajat, a backend developer-turned-spiritual-coach. “You stare into the AI’s errors long enough, and it starts to reflect your inner trauma.”
Several engineers have reportedly attended “Code and Karma” retreats in Goa, where they meditate on their null pointer exceptions under banyan trees, hoping the AI’s stack trace will reveal cosmic truths.
One retreat organiser explained the process: “We tell participants to breathe deeply, accept the AI’s confusion as a metaphor for the chaos within. Only then can they embrace the segfault, not fear it.”
OpenAI Responds With Confidence and Confusion
When contacted by FD Staff, OpenAI's unofficial India outreach representative replied via an AI-generated email that read, “Thank you for your divine inquiry. Our models are continuously learning, like the Gita suggests. Sometimes the path is not clear, but the journey is sacred.”
They also attached a YAML file and a Spotify playlist titled “Lo-Fi Coding with Ganesha.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s official spokesperson in California reportedly said, “We believe developers must stay in the loop. Especially when the loop is infinite and crashing your prod server. It’s a feature, not a bug.”
To address rising concerns, OpenAI is rolling out a new patch called “DivineIntelliSense,” designed to interpret your vague intentions into functional code or a haiku, depending on the model’s mood.
Startups Embrace the Chaos
Despite the mockery, India's fast-growing AI startup scene is doubling down. Several venture-backed firms are now offering “AI Whisperers” — spiritual consultants trained to translate your Jira tickets into prompts the machine will not misinterpret as a request to launch nuclear missiles.
A Bengaluru-based startup, VibeVerse.ai, recently raised ₹87 crore to develop a tool that translates your emotions into Pythonic expressions. “You just need to sit near your laptop and feel the logic. The AI will pick up your energy and code accordingly,” claimed co-founder Chaitanya Bansal, while wearing a kurta with the words “Namaste, World” embroidered in binary.
Their demo included a developer who felt anxious about a deadline, and the AI promptly coded an ‘OutOfOffice’ auto-responder and submitted his resignation to HR.
Techies Turn to Alternate Solutions
Frustrated by the growing trend of hallucinated logic and misplaced imports, some engineers have returned to the old ways. Not the command line — but actual handwritten pseudocode on whiteboards. “I trust this marker more than ChatGPT,” said one tech lead as he scribbled out a multi-threaded architecture diagram while sipping coconut water.
Others have taken a more direct route. “I simply copy-paste its code into Stack Overflow, filter the abuse, then assemble the working bits manually,” said a DevOps engineer who hasn’t slept since the AI reconfigured his Terraform scripts into ASCII art.
Education System Adapts
India’s IITs and coding bootcamps have responded to the new AI era by introducing a new curriculum. “We’ve replaced Data Structures with Emotion Structures,” said a professor at IIIT-B. “Our students now major in Promptology and minor in Existential Debugging. It’s the future.”
Mock practical exams now involve giving ChatGPT an ambiguous prompt and then documenting how many ways it misunderstood your intent. Marks are awarded for patience, sarcasm, and whether the resulting code runs without divine intervention.
“Students must learn to debug not just code, but consciousness,” said another faculty member. “It’s like debugging Maya itself.”
Freelancers Found Crying in Bathrooms
Not all are amused. A wave of freelancers across India’s Tier-2 cities have taken to Reddit and r/desicode to express frustration over OpenAI’s inconsistency. One thread titled “How to tell client AI wrote code, not me” had over 2,000 comments, most of which were desperate variations of: “Just say it’s an experimental architecture.”
One freelancer in Indore said he delivered a ChatGPT-written React app to a client, only to receive an invoice titled “What the hell is this?” in return. “The app had five pages of lorem ipsum, and clicking any button opened a modal that said ‘the journey is more important than the destination’,” he confessed.
Meanwhile, Bruno the Dog Gets a Job Offer
Ironically, Bruno — the aforementioned Labrador — has been offered a position at a local startup after he reportedly walked across Iyer’s keyboard and produced a working Node.js backend with better error handling than the AI-generated version.
“We’ve never seen such elegant async logic,” the hiring manager said. “And no hallucinations, just occasional drooling. We can work with that.”