for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone.
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@mntmn One of the best use cases for LLMs is to produce tools for deterministic automation. One does not have to be irrational about this issue. Follow the example of Torvalds. Stay adult, stay sane and be open-minded. Every person (or moral subject) is responsible for the code they commit or text they publish. If you don't want that responsibility, you pay someone or stay anonymous. That has and will always be the case. You can never be certain about how information was produced.
@mntmn And I don't vibe code. But that's because I simply haven't had the time to try it out.
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@mntmn not to toot my own horn but I'm doing a 40 day AI Lent to keep my brain sharp, it's probably the most intellectually rewarding (and frustrating) thing I've done recently
@budududuroiu Insightful read so far, thanks for recording and sharing it!
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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.
process beats talent in sales more than most founders want to admit. a mediocre rep with a tight ICP list outperforms a great rep with a bloated one
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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 I listen this since 30 years... If no human write code what code will AI steal, and with which energy ? I still use pens, and still write code with Vim (who would say that Vim and emacs will still be the most used editors 30 years ago ?) !
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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 Interesting take. I rarely use a pen these days - but I handwrite a LOT. My Remarkable gets constant use for so many things. I often write and doodle out ideas when programming too before turning the result into type.
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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 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.
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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 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?
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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 Just because you’ve outsourced your coding to people you’ve never had direct contact with doesn’t mean that ”manually written code will be a thing of the past”. Growing food didn’t stop being a thing just because you invaded countries and forced the people there to grow the food for you.
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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 Thank you. i'm really disheartened on how many people throw their skills and agency to the dumpster fire.
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T tofticles@helvede.net shared this topic
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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 Thank you for your inspiring words. Happy to not feel alone indeed.
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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 thank you
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@nicolaottomano @mntmn Just because you’ve outsourced your coding to people you’ve never had direct contact with doesn’t mean that ”manually written code will be a thing of the past”. Growing food didn’t stop being a thing just because you invaded countries and forced the people there to grow the food for you.
@ahltorp @nicolaottomano @mntmn
99.9% of people are not subsisting off their own-grown food any more... they might supplement what they buy in seasonally is all.
Similarly while some in the 99.9% do hand-write SIMD code or assember, they don't write whole apps in that or machine code.
There are still horse-drawn carriages, farriers, stables and so on, but they are not used by the 99.9%.
Even the people diddling themselves about gemini (the protocol) gave up, the 99.9% didn't notice.
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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 are not allowed to vibe code at work and I am so happy that my employer forbids it.
Thank you that you are not using llms for your code.
Are you using treesitter with eglot together?
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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 A true manufacturer!
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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 are the resistance.
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@ahltorp @nicolaottomano @mntmn
99.9% of people are not subsisting off their own-grown food any more... they might supplement what they buy in seasonally is all.
Similarly while some in the 99.9% do hand-write SIMD code or assember, they don't write whole apps in that or machine code.
There are still horse-drawn carriages, farriers, stables and so on, but they are not used by the 99.9%.
Even the people diddling themselves about gemini (the protocol) gave up, the 99.9% didn't notice.
@hopeless @nicolaottomano @mntmn Building compilers doesn’t require armies of lowpayed workers writing and reviewing huge amounts of assembler. All the time.
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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@mastodon.social Welcome to the Church of Emacs
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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?
