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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@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"
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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
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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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.
Have you played with Godot at all? It’s been on my to-learn list for a couple of years and some initial poking suggested it would be a great learn-to-program platform:
- It’s got some nice visual tools for the scaffolding.
- You don’t write code except in places where code is the simplest way of expressing what you want.
- It’s cross platform (and can deploy to the web).
- It makes it easy to create nicely visual things so creates things that feel like they’re exciting from the start.
- In addition to its own scripting language, it supports a bunch of ‘real’ programming languages so gives a nice on ramp for them, without introducing new languages in completely unrelated domains and environments.
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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.
Reminded me of this https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112750516875020750
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@AbramKedge @hiway @futurebird
A lot of VB code was like that. I did encounter one bit of in-house VB6 that was beautifully structured, had clean abstractions, and spoke to a SQL Server back end, so I at least have an existence proof that good, clear, maintainable code was possible in VB. I never managed to write any though. Somewhere I have some floppy disks full of truly terrible VB2 to VB4 that I wrote as a child.
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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 I talked to a friend who made a lot of money taking a company public (and who is a huge booster of llm-assisted coding) about this exact issue.
his response was kind of horrifying, but at least now I understand how these people think. He said "I don't care. companies don't fail because their code is unsustainable, they fail because they don't have a product. by the time the tech debt comes due, you should have already sold the company."
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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.
@david_chisnall @futurebird yeah, I can certainly agree that the incentives for writing small, clear, maintainable programs are... hidden, at best. That's part of what angers me.
And the management incentives - LOC, releases regardless of what's in them, integration of AI into things even if it will break everything, are powerful.
I would like to go live on the moon, please.
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@david_chisnall @futurebird yeah, I can certainly agree that the incentives for writing small, clear, maintainable programs are... hidden, at best. That's part of what angers me.
And the management incentives - LOC, releases regardless of what's in them, integration of AI into things even if it will break everything, are powerful.
I would like to go live on the moon, please.
@david_chisnall @futurebird Oh, and there's the fact that writing clean code requires time and thought. Given the number of teams I've been on which required several people to do the project, but only one gets employed - with the exact same deadlines as a full team - I've no doubt that contributes to code being produced that looks like a shitty first draft every time. Because it has to be.
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@david_chisnall @futurebird I talked to a friend who made a lot of money taking a company public (and who is a huge booster of llm-assisted coding) about this exact issue.
his response was kind of horrifying, but at least now I understand how these people think. He said "I don't care. companies don't fail because their code is unsustainable, they fail because they don't have a product. by the time the tech debt comes due, you should have already sold the company."
@Amoshias @david_chisnall @futurebird
If the purpose of a company is to be sold before the technical debt comes due, then that does explain why every web hosting service seems to come with "AI will help you build your website" but I still can't buy an actual, usable, practical in-home assistance robot that has minimal technical debt and actually works. -
@Amoshias @david_chisnall @futurebird
If the purpose of a company is to be sold before the technical debt comes due, then that does explain why every web hosting service seems to come with "AI will help you build your website" but I still can't buy an actual, usable, practical in-home assistance robot that has minimal technical debt and actually works.@robotistry @david_chisnall @futurebird while I agree with the thought of what you're posting...
What?!? Dude. that's "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on Mars?"
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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
One cool but sunny spring morning in the early 1980s I bumped into a student from Africa with whom I exchanged words with on occasion.We fell into conversation, starting with the weather and how the winter had been and colds that the winter brought. As folk used to do in the days before Covid.
They observed the following:
"You know, without medicine a cold lasts for seven days. But with medicine it only lasts a week."
Vibe coding seems to be worse than merely ineffective.
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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.
@david_chisnall @grrrr_shark @futurebird
Back in the 1980s, we build a perfectly usable full X.500 email client that ran on BBC micros (that’s 32kB of RAM, or 48kB with sideways RAM mod). Bloat has exploded since then. -
@david_chisnall @grrrr_shark @futurebird
Back in the 1980s, we build a perfectly usable full X.500 email client that ran on BBC micros (that’s 32kB of RAM, or 48kB with sideways RAM mod). Bloat has exploded since then.@KimSJ @david_chisnall @futurebird Right? The concern I was expressing was this - useful things don't NEED to be huge. But so many people don't even have the skills to make them clean and small now.
Even when I write with bloated languages/frameworks/tools now, I still think about what the code I'm writing is going to do and try to be parsimonious. But it IS a skill and if folks don't learn it, of course they won't do it.
