I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.

When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.

I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable. The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously. If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUN

~~I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.

When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.

I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.~~ If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUN

This isn’t One Hour Hot Dog. If you need a big huge fix right the hell yesterday, you fucked up last week. Possibly last year. And what’s gonna prevent that sort of company-liquidating blunder is a layer of crotchety obsessives who can spend a day reading and then commit one line. ‘Hit engine with hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $9,999.’

A system that’s pretty good at guessing a hundred places to try hitting has obvious value. Especially when undo is a thing. But this attitude of ‘the future is now, old man!’ is almost as off-base as the folks insisting a magic coding robot won’t help anybody.

But is he opinionated or is the LLM’s training corpus opinionated? Why should I care what an autocomplete has to say about this topic?

Also calculator is still prohibited in schools in many countries. Like mine. And I’m forever grateful for mental math skills I’ve gotten. Teaching math like that has it’s own downsides, but mental math is a soft skill that helps in life.

100% agreed. My teacher said that he taught us tools, how they worked and how to use them, in order for us to apply them in new ways. Even with a calculator you have to understand the underlaying logic to actually do something. Don’t know basic mathematics? Good luck using a calculator.

I think its both. you have to understand it to be able to build upon it, but it’s also no nearly as readily available as pocket calculators, and they require much more energy that too. It’s not as portable as a calculator.

Local models on a gaming PC are already a viable replacement for a Claude subscription, and are rapidly improving, so the idea that we will have powerful open models running on our phones isn’t at all far-fetched. It’s exactly the same situation as with a calculator like you said.

The American taxpayers will save them, whether they want to or not.

And tells you it is your girlfriend and to shoot up your school.

There is no good argument for including calculators before the pupils haven’t mastered basic calculations in their head, there are good arguments against it.

Not every software company is a game developer, and even at home, not every programmer plays games on their PC that require a powerful GPU. If everyone working on, for example, business software all of a sudden needs a gaming PC that will be constantly running an AI model, that will greatly increase costs, both in terms of procurement of equipment and electricity. An increase in demand for powerful GPUs in fields that traditionally had no need for them isn’t exactly going to improve the hardware cost situation either.

Whether you run the model locally or you leave it to a company, someone is going to have to pay the cost.

Okay, well you’re on a forum filled with nerds. The average AI user is asking ChatGPT or Claude or whatever the fuck. I garun-fucking-tee you they do not have the knowledge of local models or the capability to set one up. Like genuinely most Americans are fucking stupid.

Who can afford the hardware to run an open weight model? We aren’t all earning enough to afford high end NVIDIA cards (when they’re even available).

“You won’t have a tiny pocket computer with you all the time”

likely true in 20 years

I watch a lot of airplane youtube, and this just seems to be wrong. During critical phases of flight, i.e landing and descending, the pilots have a high workload even with the autopilot. They are directing the autopilot ( which isn’t obvious how to do), they’re communicating, navigating, etc.

Flight crews of the 20th century sometimes had crews of 3 or 4 people to handle all the tasks that are more automated these days. We don’t have dedicated flight engineers or navigators any more – the pilots do these jobs now too.

During the cruise phase of flight, yes the pilots have a lower workload because of the autopilot. But on lots of flights, there might not be much of a cruise at all – they climb, and then descend.

I don’t know how much commercial pilots are required to hand fly the plane, but it is a high workload even with the automation – the automation just helps them do a better job.

Just install a second autopilot that can take over if the first one fails!

The pilots job is specifically to prevent to finding out phase.

the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.

It can but nobody is out there flying CAT IIIc autoland approaches because its ‘easier’.

Just look at any productivity vs wage growth chart from any country. Anyone who thinks that any efficiency gain will pay off for workers is either naive or part of the grift.

Luddites weren’t concerned about the printing press. Their fight was over mechanized looms and knitting frames.

Their concerns were mostly about losing their jobs, as well as the absolute dog shit quality the mechanical machines produced at the time.

In 1814, printers in London did have similar conniptions over the steam press, though.

It’s the sweatshops, man. The sweatshops suck. I would absolutely rather have one set of tailored clothes, vs. endless variety from sweatshops where Bangladeshi children work for pennies an hour.

Have you seen (well, read about) 19th century working class living conditions in Britain? The main issue was always working conditions, and they were 100% right about that. And it’s not an either/or, you can absolutely do industrialization without 16 hour shifts at poverty wages but that’s clearly not what the plant owners were going to do. The offer was shit, and they turned it the fuck down.

So…have you not heard the damage fast fashion did to the planet? Sure, it make making cloth quicker and cheaper and widely available, but in the end it’s a huge source of chemical waste, landfill waste, and microplastic. Because clothing are so much cheaper to buy new than fixing it, we lost a lot of skilled labour to automation.

The same thing happened everywhere, automation take away human agency, and that take away skill learning. In the end humanity will suffer because less and less people gonna learn how to fix the shit that they rely on. That didn’t happen on accident, that’s by design. We all thought AI gonna upskill a lot of people, but i feels like instead of making a nation of artisan it gonna make a nation of 7/11. Just look at Destin’s struggle to make a fucking bbq brush fully American, the nation of 300millions people can’t even provide parts that fully made within the nation.

No. They weren’t proven wrong, pauperism was the consequence and it was horrible. Luckily we shifted that back to regimes that don’t like to report much on terrible living and environmental conditions so we don’t have the filth at our doorstep.

Maybe. I think a sizable group of people would rather put fast fashion back in the bag.

I agree. A lot of blame that should be squarely laid at the feet of bad distribution of wealth via capitalism, is being put onto technological advances making things more efficient. The fact is, even in a utopian society where every person has access to any material needs they could want, we’d want to be able to produce those things more efficiently to get them into the hands of more people at a lower cost to society as a whole.

If we had a fair system - firms having to be run as worker cooperatives, wealth going into the hands of the working class instead of a few capitalists, etc - none of the Luddite-esque complaints would hold. In this example, yes, cost of clothing would go up if we fairly paid all textile workers and if they owned part of the company they work for. It would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than bespoke, hand made clothing requiring one skilled worker tens or hundreds of man hours of work.

And as hard as it is to change that system, I actually think that’s easier than trying to put the genie that is technology back in the bottle.

most users are also too accepting of slop work. So the MVP of yesterday is the final product of today.

One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter

No, I think technology should serve the people, not the rich people who own the means of production. I suggest you actually read the article I linked.

It was not really about the machinery, or the quality of the work. It was about the rights of the common person, their livelihood, and their very lives. The reason the Luddites are viewed disparagingly is purely because they lost, and history always favours the victors.

You have to remember that this all took place in a time where workers like you and I had no real rights of our own. There was no universal suffrage, only those with capital had a say in matters of government. So when machines were brought in to your workplace, and the powers that be proclaimed that a large bunch of us would be redundant, we despaired. This was the way we scraped by, it’s how we fed ourselves and our families.

So what did they end up doing? They protested. They sabotaged the machines to buy us more time, in some cases they smashed them, in other cases they removed and hid some parts; each day a machine wasn’t operational was another day that they got paid their wages, another day they’d survive.

Malcolm I. Thomis argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. “These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made.” ~src

The Luddites specifically targeted the machines, because their goal wasn’t to hurt people, but rather to have their voices heard. This was really the only avenue they had any power to make a difference.

The powers that be obviously weren’t happy about this, they’d spent money on expensive machinery, and now the common rabble was sabotaging and destroying their property. So they drafted laws, like the destruction of stocking frames etc. act of 1812 which classed meddling with the machinery, or the produced goods a felony punishable by death. You can read the act here.

May it therefore please Your Majesty that it may be enacted; […] That if any Person or Persons shall, by Day or by Night, enter by Force into any House, Shop or Place, with an Intent to cut or destroy any Framework knitted Pieces […] or with an Intent to break or destroy any Frame, Machine, Engine, Tool, Instrument or Utensil, used in and for the working and making of any such Framework knitted Pieces […] every Offender being thereof lawfully convicted shall be adjudged guilty of Felony, and shall suffer Death, as in cases of Felony without Benefit of Clergy.

And people were killed for this. From an archived page on Bolton Council’s website.

Job Fletcher aged 34, James Smith aged 31, Thomas Kerfoot aged 26 and Abraham Charison aged 16, were sentenced to death and hanged at Lancaster. Their fate was shared by three men and a woman who had been charged with “riotous assembly” in Manchester and with damage to property and stealing food (mostly potatoes).

This is ultimately what ended the Luddite movement. The unfeeling machinery of capitalism churned ever onward, the ruling class sent out the military to quell the riots, and eventually when enough workers (including children) had died for the cause without making any marked difference, they gave up the fight.

The Luddites were absolutely right in terms of rights of the individual workers, and that’s a lesson we still haven’t learned today. It’s not unreasonable for an industry to undergo large operative shifts, but the people affected negatively by this should still be cared for. It’s not reasonable to throw a person to the wayside and watch them die just because a machine replaced them.

I agree with you in so far as the luddites were not enlightened ideological opponents to technology.

While it’s true that it would be foolish to disregard history i don’t think the loom is analogous to generative AI, and the luddites aren’t really illuminating here.

The evidence thus far is that the current generation of AI is an incremental improvement in productivity in the vast majority of industries.

What do you think luddites believed and did?..

It’s like you didn’t read the article.

You could have saved a lot of time and just said you’re unfamiliar with their argument.

I’m the “good at exams” type, I find paper writing (or novel writing… 😢) unpleasantly tedious. If we lose the “good at structuring complex thoughts in a way that can be coherently decoded by other humans” types, the “good at exams” types will suffer. We need people who can write good papers and people who can recall diverse facts and arrange them into simple shapes quickly.

I wasn’t great at exams, but I think if I re-did university today I’d still do much better because my personal learning style is best when I talk through the material with someone. Sitting in a lecture listening to someone monologue at me, reading a static textbook, those weren’t great. But with LLMs every student now has full-time access to a “live tutor” with infinite patience and no sense of social risk from asking it dumb questions. It’s absolutely my perfect learning environment.

Yeah I would have done much better in high school like this, though I don’t think AI will eliminate the poster projects unfortunately.

I have a little more hope for future generations. Regardless of if you are primarily using ai to speed up a traditional work flow or vibe coding, there still are more and less effective ways to get things done. I’ve found if I write sonething I’m familiar with like bash or Python, I “know enough” to write functions and refactor incrementally. It’s a methodical process which produces code better than I can write by myself in less time.

Compare that to when I write Lisp. There it’s more or less throw shit at the wall until I somewhat get what I want. It takes longer and can be next to impossible to extend or effectively refactor.

Based on that observation of myself, I think we’ll find two (and probably more) kinds of programmers in the future. Ones who use it as an assistant to speed up a traditional workflow, and those who produce the slop that we are afraid of.

Perhaps to give us any amount of additional hope/comparison to now. There still have been people who have programmed now who create slop. And that comes to the way we use references like stack exchange or the Arch Wiki. Are you copy and pasting while learning what things mean and learning in the process? Or are you just stringing things together to get results at all? I don’t think we would argue those references made all of us worse.

So I think it’s an apt concern, but we’ll have to wait to see what it’s like whole sale. I was a doubter for a long time, but I’ve come to understand where Torvalds et al are coming from.

That’s a very good point

It can’t really write maintainable code without a lot of re-prompting and corrections.

Which is a skillset being learned. One which users are presumably better at than non-users, since they’re practicing it. If the chatbot-that-codes Just Worked, there’d be nothing to discuss; we could consider human coding successfully completed. The people who don’t move up to proper computer science can get on with whatever they wanted software for. We only teach them all of this because they’ve got shit to do, and up until now, it’s been really really hard. Like if beginner astronomy meant telescope engineering.

Already the key complaint has become “maintainability.” That’s quite a high-level criticism. When I sass specific compilers, it’s for using register-juggling macros that could have been one hardware instruction… not for adding a feature from a one-sentence description, but in a way that will complicate any future refactor. Or would, if refactoring was not also something you can tell the chatbot to do.

Compiler developers are a hardened core of ultranerds. I couldn’t do it above a toy level. If I needed to understand how they work, in detail, then I would be in trouble. Thankfully it is sufficient to abstract all of their work into ‘C goes in ARM comes out.’ Or at least to mumble about intermediate representations and distract people with Godbolt before running away. Sure, ‘add a button above the widget’ is more pluripotent than a K&R-standard Hello World, but even the foundation you celebrate is layer upon layer of Don’t Worry About It.

AI coding right now is a blunt instrument. Those often suffice. And this one can already be used to remove layers. To obviate a fat framework. To translate to a faster language. To golf. Or it could format your hard drive if a website tells it to, IDFK. It is a higher class of footgun. We take those.

or we end up with a JS-based start menu in Win11