having so much fun with this vibe coding what used to take me two or three hours can now be done in a single day
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having so much fun with this vibe coding what used to take me two or three hours can now be done in a single day
@futurebird it's funny because understanding the joke implies that people are normally productive more than an hour in a day
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I feel obligated to try all of this stuff. And there was a moment when I was a little impressed an excited. I thought "wow now I can make all of those apps I always think about but don't have time to make"
I think I felt that same way when I first started using the internet and seeing all of the code libraries people were just sharing.
But adapting the work of others is time intensive in a way that adapting your own work will never be.
@futurebird
AI really is a game-changer.
Suddenly, everyone has great ideas how some parts of their work can be automated or streamlined.After listening to one of these ideas for a minute or two, it becomes clear most of the time that a simple script or piece of code can do exactly what the colleagues want.
After AI dies, I think I will buy a magic wishing owl (plushie) or something that allows people to express their often very useful ideas.
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@voltagex @futurebird Me too... I think I engage in vibe reading a bit too much!
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I feel obligated to try all of this stuff. And there was a moment when I was a little impressed an excited. I thought "wow now I can make all of those apps I always think about but don't have time to make"
I think I felt that same way when I first started using the internet and seeing all of the code libraries people were just sharing.
But adapting the work of others is time intensive in a way that adapting your own work will never be.
@futurebird
Over most of my career, I spent most of my time:Talking to the subject matter expert (aka client)
Learning and understanding their jargon
Puzzling out what the real problem was
Designing the solution
and only then writing a small amount of code.
Test, discover that red really means birdRinse and repeat.
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@voltagex @futurebird lol me too ... my heart sank until I started laughing
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@voltagex @futurebird lol me too ... my heart sank until I started laughing
I mean it's like the code itself. You describe the app you want, and *boom* there is all the code, it looks great!
So professional, everything is neatly commented. It looks wonderful.
... looks ...
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I feel obligated to try all of this stuff. And there was a moment when I was a little impressed an excited. I thought "wow now I can make all of those apps I always think about but don't have time to make"
I think I felt that same way when I first started using the internet and seeing all of the code libraries people were just sharing.
But adapting the work of others is time intensive in a way that adapting your own work will never be.
The vibe coding thing does highlight how much code is pointless. A load of the things that I’ve seen people be impressed with are things that should be a couple of hundred lines of code but somehow modern frameworks have focused on making things require more code to accomplish the same thing. Systems like HyperCard or even Flash let people produce rich GUIs with almost no code. The kinds of things that could be built in a visual editor with a small amount of code 15-25 years ago are now being generated as tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable and buggy LLM code.
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The vibe coding thing does highlight how much code is pointless. A load of the things that I’ve seen people be impressed with are things that should be a couple of hundred lines of code but somehow modern frameworks have focused on making things require more code to accomplish the same thing. Systems like HyperCard or even Flash let people produce rich GUIs with almost no code. The kinds of things that could be built in a visual editor with a small amount of code 15-25 years ago are now being generated as tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable and buggy LLM code.
hypercard was suppressed by The Man because it made the people too powerful!!
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having so much fun with this vibe coding what used to take me two or three hours can now be done in a single day
& here I am vibe updating my MapTool Numenera campaign framework. I worked initially on it for well over a year, implementing only say 40% of the features that I fantasised of. Then I let it go, it was not worth it. During the last 5 weekends, I not only completed everything, but optimised it & added plenty additional feats.
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The vibe coding thing does highlight how much code is pointless. A load of the things that I’ve seen people be impressed with are things that should be a couple of hundred lines of code but somehow modern frameworks have focused on making things require more code to accomplish the same thing. Systems like HyperCard or even Flash let people produce rich GUIs with almost no code. The kinds of things that could be built in a visual editor with a small amount of code 15-25 years ago are now being generated as tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable and buggy LLM code.
@david_chisnall @futurebird One theory I have here, is that "more effort" is easier to translate into "more money" than "quality" - especially when most people don't see the bloat.
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@david_chisnall @futurebird One theory I have here, is that "more effort" is easier to translate into "more money" than "quality" - especially when most people don't see the bloat.
@david_chisnall @futurebird Software quality advice for commoners? Check the size! Bigger is always worse!
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@futurebird
AI really is a game-changer.
Suddenly, everyone has great ideas how some parts of their work can be automated or streamlined.After listening to one of these ideas for a minute or two, it becomes clear most of the time that a simple script or piece of code can do exactly what the colleagues want.
After AI dies, I think I will buy a magic wishing owl (plushie) or something that allows people to express their often very useful ideas.
"After AI dies"
️ -
having so much fun with this vibe coding what used to take me two or three hours can now be done in a single day
Just like any other tool, you need time to learn how to get the best out of it. How much time did you spend with it?
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I mean it's like the code itself. You describe the app you want, and *boom* there is all the code, it looks great!
So professional, everything is neatly commented. It looks wonderful.
... looks ...
@futurebird and do people even want all these apps? The app stores are overflowing with useless apps already.
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The vibe coding thing does highlight how much code is pointless. A load of the things that I’ve seen people be impressed with are things that should be a couple of hundred lines of code but somehow modern frameworks have focused on making things require more code to accomplish the same thing. Systems like HyperCard or even Flash let people produce rich GUIs with almost no code. The kinds of things that could be built in a visual editor with a small amount of code 15-25 years ago are now being generated as tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable and buggy LLM code.
@david_chisnall @futurebird But also, I've seen a lot of less experienced programmers, before vibe coding was possible, just write thousands of lines of code for something that could be a hundred because no one teaches them the value of parsimony or requires the abstract/mathematical/architectural sophistication of them to really understand what's going on at a low level.
I know this is very Old Woman Yells At Clouds, but part of why even non-AI-generated code ends up being pointless is that someone decided Moore's Law was an excuse to not teach what was going on under the hood. I can't even have a conversation about how why things are bad with juniors sometimes because they aren't asked to think that way. Not ALL of them, by any means. But a lot.
Ah well. Since nobody can afford RAM anymore anyway, people will either run slop code in the cloud no one can debug, use, or maintain, or learn the hard way.
I despair.
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hypercard was suppressed by The Man because it made the people too powerful!!
In the ‘90s there was a huge push in software engineering to component models. COM and CORBA both came out of this. The idea was to build libraries as reusable blocks. Brad Cox wrote a lot about this and created Objective-C as a way of packaging C libraries with late-bound interfaces that could be exposed to higher-level languages easily.
This combined with the push towards visual programming, where you’d be able to drag these libraries into your GUI and then wire things up to their interfaces with drag-and-drop UIs. The ‘Visual’ in Visual Studio is a hangover from this push.
Advocates imagined stores of reusable components and people being able to build apps for precisely their use case by just taking these blocks and assembling them.
It failed because the incentives were exactly wrong for proprietary COTS apps. Companies made money by locking people into app ecosystems. If it’s easy for someone to buy a (small, cheap) new component to Word 95 that adds the new feature that they need, how do you convince them to buy Word 97?
The incentives for F/OSS are the exact opposite. If another project can add a feature that some users want (but you don’t) without forcing you to maintain that code, everyone wins. But we now have an entire generation that has grown up with big monolithic apps who copy them in F/OSS ecosystems because it’s all they’ve ever known.
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hypercard was suppressed by The Man because it made the people too powerful!!
@futurebird @david_chisnall Visual Basic as well, I will not forget the snide comments from "experts" that a younger me received when trying to learn the brain rot language.
// I have used LLMs to make a few utilities and apps that I have been using every day for months now - things not interesting or profitable enough for anybody else to make.
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@david_chisnall @futurebird But also, I've seen a lot of less experienced programmers, before vibe coding was possible, just write thousands of lines of code for something that could be a hundred because no one teaches them the value of parsimony or requires the abstract/mathematical/architectural sophistication of them to really understand what's going on at a low level.
I know this is very Old Woman Yells At Clouds, but part of why even non-AI-generated code ends up being pointless is that someone decided Moore's Law was an excuse to not teach what was going on under the hood. I can't even have a conversation about how why things are bad with juniors sometimes because they aren't asked to think that way. Not ALL of them, by any means. But a lot.
Ah well. Since nobody can afford RAM anymore anyway, people will either run slop code in the cloud no one can debug, use, or maintain, or learn the hard way.
I despair.
I think there are probably some interesting incentives for people to study here. It’s struck me a lot that the popular GUI frameworks today take far more code to achieve good results than good ones from the ‘90s (though less than the worst of the ‘90s). I suspect that it’s a combination of three things:
- Good API design is simply not taught anywhere.
- Poor API design is an externality. Consumers of your library / framework pay the cost, not you.
- Frameworks that require more code make it easier for their users to justify their salaries. If someone writes a 300 line app, it seems like a toy to their management. If they write a 10,000-line app that does the same thing, it’s much easier to explain why it cost money to build.
None of this is really to do with the cost of RAM or compute. Smalltalk-80 was a full GUI on a machine with 1 MiB of RAM and a CPU slower than the slowest Cortex-A0 and it ran interpreted bytecode.
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I think there are probably some interesting incentives for people to study here. It’s struck me a lot that the popular GUI frameworks today take far more code to achieve good results than good ones from the ‘90s (though less than the worst of the ‘90s). I suspect that it’s a combination of three things:
- Good API design is simply not taught anywhere.
- Poor API design is an externality. Consumers of your library / framework pay the cost, not you.
- Frameworks that require more code make it easier for their users to justify their salaries. If someone writes a 300 line app, it seems like a toy to their management. If they write a 10,000-line app that does the same thing, it’s much easier to explain why it cost money to build.
None of this is really to do with the cost of RAM or compute. Smalltalk-80 was a full GUI on a machine with 1 MiB of RAM and a CPU slower than the slowest Cortex-A0 and it ran interpreted bytecode.
Could that be it?
I've mostly noticed that the kind of things I want to do with computers has generally gotten much more difficult to do, and far far more difficult to teach.
But making the computer do what you want remains a real source of joy. My 5th grade students were delighted to make a text adventure type program ... I thought they'd find it boring but they were so excited to have their friends try their adventures.
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@futurebird @david_chisnall Visual Basic as well, I will not forget the snide comments from "experts" that a younger me received when trying to learn the brain rot language.
// I have used LLMs to make a few utilities and apps that I have been using every day for months now - things not interesting or profitable enough for anybody else to make.
@hiway @futurebird @david_chisnall I fixed a bug in my manager's Visual Basic program. He said it was still there.
On closer inspection, I found that every screen in the program was a complete copy and paste of the first page code, with a tiny amount of code added for that specific functional area. The same bug was in the code twelve times.
To be fair, his speciality was technical drawing. I think of him as the original design pattern for LLMs.
