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

I feel obligated to try all of this stuff. And there was a moment when I was a little impressed an excited. I thought "wow now I can make all of those apps I always think about but don't have time to make"

I think I felt that same way when I first started using the internet and seeing all of the code libraries people were just sharing.

But adapting the work of others is time intensive in a way that adapting your own work will never be.

@futurebird see now clearly you need to be using the latest models and adopt the MDITA2 MEGA-do-it-all-2.0 markdown framework in order to make it take several other people's days

@futurebird it's funny because understanding the joke implies that people are normally productive more than an hour in a day

@futurebird was worried for a minute and then I re-read your post... maybe twice.

@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.

@voltagex @futurebird Me too... I think I engage in vibe reading a bit too much!

@futurebird
Over most of my career, I spent most of my time:

Talking to the subject matter expert (aka client)
Learning and understanding their jargon
Puzzling out what the real problem was
Designing the solution
and only then writing a small amount of code.
Test, discover that red really means bird

Rinse and repeat.

@voltagex @futurebird lol me too ... my heart sank until I started laughing

@andyinabox @voltagex

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

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

hypercard was suppressed by The Man because it made the people too powerful!!

@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!

@wakame @futurebird

"After AI dies" ‍️

@futurebird

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?

@futurebird and do people even want all these apps? The app stores are overflowing with useless apps already.

@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.

@futurebird

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.

@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.