My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise.
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@jonathanhogg @jarkman Ack. Having now watched, I think your Alpaca talk is a pretty good intro. I see some resonance in your approach with OpenSCAD (different goals, of course).
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I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.
@jonathanhogg that's an interesting take. wouldn't that mean the same applies to art then?
Software development is in my opinion a creative task, and "AI" has shown that people will take shortcuts to get "results" faster just to get the recognition. I think the problem might be more in impatience and how our society doesn't allow things to take time.
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@jonathanhogg @jarkman Ack. Having now watched, I think your Alpaca talk is a pretty good intro. I see some resonance in your approach with OpenSCAD (different goals, of course).
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We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.
@warmsignull [thread]
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@dasgrueneblatt I think you have misunderstood me: I think vibe coding is a horrendous problem, but it is a symptom of an industry failing. That people are trying to steer a tank with a speak'n'spell is because we have not made decent bikes.
" That people are trying to steer a tank with a speak'n'spell is because we have not made decent bikes." -- if we look at the real-world situation of your metaphor, we see that when "decent bikes" ARE finally here, the establishment begins to gatekeep and legislate against them /because/ they are too effective, at overturning the status quo - ostensibly on the grounds that they are "dangerous" when in the wrong hands.
Wondering if the analogy feeds back in the other direction too.
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@jonathanhogg that's an interesting take. wouldn't that mean the same applies to art then?
Software development is in my opinion a creative task, and "AI" has shown that people will take shortcuts to get "results" faster just to get the recognition. I think the problem might be more in impatience and how our society doesn't allow things to take time.
@codingcatgirl Thanks for this! As someone who has also called themself an artist for over a decade, I have a lot of thoughts on this too, but perhaps I need to mull for a bit and then start a new thread. I’ll drop you a link when I start posting
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg Scratch is excellent. My kid's been using it. I used hypercard at his age and it was a lot fun.
Had it not been because our teacher had acquired two macs into the class, and we could spend time before and after school, I don't think it would have been as fun. It's not just the tools, but also the environment and culture.
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@jarkman @jonathanhogg Several years ago, I played around with using Haskell as a substrate for a DSL. Used a combinator parser (Parsec) to spit out a directly executable “compiled” function. I’ve occasionally thought it would be fun to do something similar for CSG.
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@jarkman @jonathanhogg Several years ago, I played around with using Haskell as a substrate for a DSL. Used a combinator parser (Parsec) to spit out a directly executable “compiled” function. I’ve occasionally thought it would be fun to do something similar for CSG.
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My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
@jonathanhogg At worst, it's screamingly wrong in a way that only someone knowledgeable will recognize. Thus chatbots become a source of disinformation.
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@jonathanhogg Afterward:
The program manager eventually left the company, and the team immediately rewrote the editor in Java/Swing. It took a summer, but now the company could brag that it used Java exclusively to write tools for Java.
I certainly never met a customer who cared whether the editor was written in Java. For that matter, nobody cared that the core analysis engine was written in C++.
Programming is a pop culture.
@raganwald @jonathanhogg Well... The only reason I would care if the editor is written in Java vs Electron vs C++ is that I would notice how the memory got hogged, or the UI would think for minutes, or - rarely - it would be almost immediate (albeit missing half of the features and sometimes crashing completely).
