for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone.
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@hopeless @nicolaottomano @mntmn Building compilers doesn’t require armies of lowpayed workers writing and reviewing huge amounts of assembler. All the time.
@ahltorp @nicolaottomano @mntmn ... yeah except OP said "excellent compilers"... that's a huge amount of work for nontrivial languages no matter who ends up doing it.
It's worth bearing in mind 1) different contexts will get different rides, and 2) we are in a transition with stuff changing rapidly underneath us, the pricing will not stay still either. So we all have to keep an open mind about what the future will bring, whether currently approving of AI from our context or not.
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Hi Lucie, I love the sentiment. I do think it is important to understand what good coding is, and coding is enjoyable.
But... sorry, I have a "but"
I am an experieced 30 year coder. The truth is that the best human coder cannot keep up with what AI coding can do. I was shocked when I realized this but it's true.
AI can keep the entire code base in its buffer and scan and find things instantly that I would not know. It can refactor, debug and redeploy. It can generate documentation instantly. Any API, even ones I have never seen to some esoteric endpoint, it can master instantly. it has been trained billions and billions of lines of code. That is more than I have by a factor of over 100,00 million.
It is like having a team of 10 cross-disciplinary developers working with you plus a documentation writer , a QA person and project manager.
If I have a question about how something works, I can ask it, and it describes it and gives me links to the relevant section.
It is only getting better. Every few months its capabilities leap incredibly.
It still needs a team leader. It needs someone to guide what it can do. That is the role to embrace. You will be a much better team leader if you understand the fundamentals.
Believe me, I understand that there are plenty of downsides to this. And .. it scares the hell out of me. But wishing it were not so will not make it go away.
I dont know if you have tried the most recent releases - I use Claude Code -- but you owe it to yourself to try it if only to gauge what you are up against.
And by all means -- keep learning to code on your own -- but if that is the only tool in your quiver, it should be a hobby, not a means to make a living.
@vashbear @mntmn This post reply received at least one unjust, impolite response. The posts' authors are kindly sharing insightful and useful summary of a human experience. Such attacks by humans on this post reply is an example of AI winning: it does not do what rude people do here. There is fear of reporting the transformative effect of IT, of which AI-like tools are an apotheosis, because humans are rude and confrontational and grossly unfair in response. Thanks for the post.
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@ahltorp @nicolaottomano @mntmn ... yeah except OP said "excellent compilers"... that's a huge amount of work for nontrivial languages no matter who ends up doing it.
It's worth bearing in mind 1) different contexts will get different rides, and 2) we are in a transition with stuff changing rapidly underneath us, the pricing will not stay still either. So we all have to keep an open mind about what the future will bring, whether currently approving of AI from our context or not.
@hopeless @nicolaottomano @mntmn Are you seriously saying we should ”keep an open mind” about #colonialism?
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn we should start a club
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn because you are fighting with river will flow anyway. It is inevitable in this moment. Point is using it for sunnum bonum. Anything can be good or bad. AI itself replication of human capabilities. Question you should ask is this how is all happening? Where we come from? And interestingly answer was always open still Is. You need to look deeper.
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn This is the way! Keeping the craft alive!
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn
️
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@mntmn because you are fighting with river will flow anyway. It is inevitable in this moment. Point is using it for sunnum bonum. Anything can be good or bad. AI itself replication of human capabilities. Question you should ask is this how is all happening? Where we come from? And interestingly answer was always open still Is. You need to look deeper.
@Betelgeus3 @mntmn Resistance is futile you say? I don't want to be a borg. I plan to outlive the bastards.
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@mntmn
My 2 cents. As a former programmer and fountain pens collector, manually written code will be a thing of the past in, maybe, 5 years. Those manually writing code will do it for the pleasure of doing it, not for productivity. The same way we switched to PC to literally (no pun intended
) write anything, relegating pens to the role of collector's items.@nicolaottomano @mntmn How many fusion reactors are out there? They were just around the corner too. Why do you want to rely on something that is intrinsically insecure?
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@Betelgeus3 @mntmn Resistance is futile you say? I don't want to be a borg. I plan to outlive the bastards.
@ariaflame @mntmn you can't fight with a shadow. Artificial intelligence was there already we have think about absolute intelligence who keeps you alive. Aware and sentient. AI can be used for food or bad it's neutral. History showed again and again pendulum swings comes back to middle at the end. AI being used since 2000s it's not new , it used by governments corporations now there are free models we can use it too for good. This is what I am saying.
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@ariaflame @mntmn you can't fight with a shadow. Artificial intelligence was there already we have think about absolute intelligence who keeps you alive. Aware and sentient. AI can be used for food or bad it's neutral. History showed again and again pendulum swings comes back to middle at the end. AI being used since 2000s it's not new , it used by governments corporations now there are free models we can use it too for good. This is what I am saying.
@Betelgeus3 @mntmn Guns can be used for good or bad and I still have no interest in owning or using one. You don't even know what you mean when you say AI. Because I don't mind machine learning, but I have no interest in the stochastic parrots that are LLMs. There is no such thing as aware and sentient artificial intelligence, nor does there appear to be any coming.
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn I would say I mostly just use an editor, but every now and then, generating some throw-away utility or getting some initial setup going is nice. Spending 15 minutes less typing does not matter if your recompile loop takes two hours or getting a review takes 3 days.
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Hi Lucie, I love the sentiment. I do think it is important to understand what good coding is, and coding is enjoyable.
But... sorry, I have a "but"
I am an experieced 30 year coder. The truth is that the best human coder cannot keep up with what AI coding can do. I was shocked when I realized this but it's true.
AI can keep the entire code base in its buffer and scan and find things instantly that I would not know. It can refactor, debug and redeploy. It can generate documentation instantly. Any API, even ones I have never seen to some esoteric endpoint, it can master instantly. it has been trained billions and billions of lines of code. That is more than I have by a factor of over 100,00 million.
It is like having a team of 10 cross-disciplinary developers working with you plus a documentation writer , a QA person and project manager.
If I have a question about how something works, I can ask it, and it describes it and gives me links to the relevant section.
It is only getting better. Every few months its capabilities leap incredibly.
It still needs a team leader. It needs someone to guide what it can do. That is the role to embrace. You will be a much better team leader if you understand the fundamentals.
Believe me, I understand that there are plenty of downsides to this. And .. it scares the hell out of me. But wishing it were not so will not make it go away.
I dont know if you have tried the most recent releases - I use Claude Code -- but you owe it to yourself to try it if only to gauge what you are up against.
And by all means -- keep learning to code on your own -- but if that is the only tool in your quiver, it should be a hobby, not a means to make a living.
@vashbear paraphrasing your words:
"if you dont use AI you cant program for money"
fuck right off. this is a capitalist fallacy argument. there will always be those who uphold human values moreso than the drive to be "more"
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@vashbear @mntmn If what you’re saying is true, and not cherrypicked, there is no excuse whatsoever to not move on to better programming languages. Are you? Are other vibecoders?
To languages and toolchains where the ”compilation process” isn’t using an unconstrained random number generator, but where you describe your problem formally and succinctly and get the same result every time.
> If what you’re saying is true, and not cherry-picked, there is no excuse whatsoever to not move on to better programming languages.
The main constraint on this is where the application is deployed. The code that is generated still needs to be deployed and run somewhere, and it depends on the hosting provider and what is available under the client's paid plan. So in practice, that limits the language and libraries that can be used, and what I have tried.
But outside of client work, you make a good point. It would be interesting to experiment with other languages, like Rust for example.
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn Definitely needed to hear this! Thanks!
I'll follow you; for my own sanity I need to listen to techies who can figure stuff out without relying on the slop machine
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for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn
Time to demolish the false prophets and their corpulent chatbot gods with some good old Praxis.
https://fe.disroot.org/notice/B3suW8zRb30yfiuCWm
(in his case, a search engine for code)
My programming knowledge is limited to pasting a W3Schools template into Komposer/Bluegriffon and looking up the rest the need arose: along with digging into ZDoom mods and documentation to turn Doom into a more movement-centric game (jetpacks, high jumps, dashing, that kinda thing). -
@vashbear @mntmn wow, this is amazing! They didn’t ask. You acknowledged that they didn’t ask. And yet you still couldn’t stop yourself to come in and post an essay proselytizing AI at a person who, once again, did not ask.
Is there something about using AI that makes people unable to help themselves? I mean, do you really think a person who runs an open source hardware company needed you to mansplain AI at them?
My intent is not to "proselytize AI". As I said, it scares the hell out of me.
Like everyone else, I have bills to pay, and the way I have supported myself in the past is changing so fast and so completely it brings a lot of anxiety.
I personally feel I have two choices:
1) find another career
2) learn and adapt to still be employable -
for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
@mntmn Thank you!
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@vashbear paraphrasing your words:
"if you dont use AI you cant program for money"
fuck right off. this is a capitalist fallacy argument. there will always be those who uphold human values moreso than the drive to be "more"
>fuck right off
well, thank you for that.
> "if you dont use AI you cant program for money"
I think that gets right to the heart of the matter.
I think that is a topic worthy of serious discussion. My concern, and it fills me with anxiety, is that this is the direction we are headed.
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@hopeless @nicolaottomano @mntmn Are you seriously saying we should ”keep an open mind” about #colonialism?
@ahltorp @nicolaottomano @mntmn
It's OK bro, you can keep your mind closed against the scary strawmen. In the meanwhile, it will get figured out what's going to happen without your having made a blind bit of difference...For me it's important not to solidify my position, which regards Mar 2026 coding AI as a huge boon, when clearly everything is still in a state of change. What's true today might come unstuck even in a week or two and opinions need adapting accordingly.
