Vitalik Buterin Says AI Coding Could Help Ethereum Roadmap

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says an experiment that used artificial intelligence to prototype the blockchain’s roadmap out to 2030 in just a few weeks could have lessons for developers. 

“This is quite an impressive experiment. Vibe-coding the entire 2030 roadmap within weeks,” Buterin posted to X on Saturday after a developer made a bet with Vitalik in February that one person could use AI to code a reference implementation of the blockchain’s roadmap.

Buterin added that AI is “massively accelerating coding” and that people “should be open to the possibility that the Ethereum roadmap will finish much faster than people expect, at a much higher standard of security than people expect.”

Vibe coding is where AI creates the code for an application, allowing developers to quickly create software. The practice has become more popular as AI models have improved at coding; however, some warn that AI-generated code can be insecure.

Vitalik says AI code would have “critical bugs”

Vitalik said that there were “massive caveats” to using AI, as the speed at which the code was written means it “almost certainly lots of critical bugs, and probably in some cases ‘stub’ versions of a thing where the AI did not even try making the full version.”

“But six months ago, even this was far outside the realm of possibility, and what matters is where the trend is going,” he added.

Related: Ethereum smart accounts are finally coming ‘within a year’ — Vitalik Buterin

Buterin cautioned that instead of focusing on speed, more emphasis should be dedicated to security. 

“The right way to use it is to take half the gains from AI in speed, and half the gains in security: generate more test-cases, formally verify everything, make more multi-implementations of things.”

He said that he was personally excited about the possibility that bug-free code, “long considered an idealistic delusion,” will finally become first possible and “then a basic expectation.”

Buterin has been active commenting on the recently released roadmap from the Ethereum Foundation called “Strawmap,” which lays out all upgrades planned for the next four years. 

He has previously proposed plans to make Ethereum quantum-resistant and on Sunday said that account abstraction, or smart accounts, would “happen within a year.” 

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