Vibe Decoding: Building the Critical Code Studies Workbench
David M. Berry The 9th Critical Code Studies Working Group ran online from January to February 2026, hosted by Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglas. Working Groups have become an important part of the CCS field, bringing together scholars, programmers, artists, and critics to examine the cultural significance of computer source code across several weeks of sustained but asynchronous discussion. In previous iterations I had contributed as a participant, for example on ELIZA as a code object selected for collective discussion and analysis. This time I arrived with a different idea, to vibe code a tool for the practice of undertaking critical code readings. Over eighteen days, from 19 January to 6 February, working in dialogue with Claude Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic's large language model running in their Claude Code development environment, I developed a web application for annotating and analysing source code. The reason for developing this was the result of working with a group of colle...
