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on vibecoding
D'Arcy Norman, 2026/09/04

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D'Arcy Norman collects his thoughts and experiences on using AI to quickly generate software prototypes and useful tools, a.k.a. vibecoding. "My career has somehow always been as a kind of translator between Nerds and Not-Nerds," he writes, "able to articulate things well enough that things make enough sense to everyone. Turns out, that’s kind of the vibecoding superpower." Vibecoding is an incredibly useful tool, he writes, but most definitely will not replace professional programmers.

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Digital Sovereignty In South African Higher Education
Laura Czerniewicz, Andrew Crouch, Delicia Davids, Jennifer Feldman, Kende Kefale, Paul Prinsloo, Janet Small, South African Research Chair in Teaching and Learning, 2026/09/04

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This paper (36 page PDF), which can be found via the University of Johannesburg portal, offers a useful discussion of digital sovereignty generally, with a particular focus on South Africa. The core of the paper is a framework describing degrees of sovereignty at the national, institutional, and individual level, each describing business models along with ontological, epistemological and sovereignty implications. This part of the paper is pretty clear; the section focused on South Africa is more of a slog, though there is a useful discussion of Nancy Fraser's model of justice: "Fraser's starting point is that 'the most general meaning of justice is parity of participation', by which she means that justice requires social arrangements that allow all to participate as peers in social life. She then identifies three mutually entangled dimensions through which participatory parity can be blocked: distribution, recognition, and representation." With respect to representation, "affirmative responses seek voice within existing governance," while "transformative responses aim to change the underlying grammar." What this means for South Africa is that an analysis requires more than just an examination of decisions made at the political level, but also of the forces informing them, and often constraining them.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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