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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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.
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.
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@jonathanhogg Well yes, but vibe coding does not solve that, or does it? People kind of know what they want, but they still cannot get it. Just something that looks like it and is really hard to debug. That's got be even more frustrating? Maybe I misunderstood you. I'm definitely not arguing that programming (what's the other one called now? the non-vibe programming. Does it have a name yet?) is easy and fun and the tools are good, oh no.
I'm honestly very surprised by the love for chat interfaces. I don't get it. But apparently that's an amazing way to for example search the web. Not keyword -> list of links, but full question -> long answer text -> follow-up question -> even more text, etc. I thought people don't like to read long texts? But apparently the key is something in the wording. Make it say "i" and "talk" to me and add emotions.
Maybe we'll get better tools out of this in the long run? Harness the power of the ball of statistics to create not the subtly wrong full app, but parts, smaller, clearly delineated building blocks of well-known, testable code that are easy to put together to create the whole thing? Okay, that's libraries, aehm, but with a different interface? Scratch/blockly but as a chat?
@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.
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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.
@jonathanhogg That's a great picture, thank you. Yes, vibe coding as a symptom.
I need to think about this. Thank you for starting it.
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@jonathanhogg @michael @jarkman I once asked a very senior HPC developer at Red Hat what keeps him up at night and he said, paraphrasing and pulling from memory that's about 15 years old now, "we haven't created new computer science since the 1960s and I fear we'll exhaust what we know before we discover anything new," and I think about that a lot these days.
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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 well put
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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.
"planet-boiling roulette wheel" is the name of my upcoming experimental jazzcore EP
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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.
@jonathanhogg you're right, but also, it's more than that - today's tooling is worse for non-experts than the stuff that used to exist
because it's designed around corporate priorities, not individual ones. it's the factory looms problem.
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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 HyperCard was great.
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@jonathanhogg you're right, but also, it's more than that - today's tooling is worse for non-experts than the stuff that used to exist
because it's designed around corporate priorities, not individual ones. it's the factory looms problem.
@ireneista @jonathanhogg this. It effects small businesses too. What works for a thousand or even 100 engineers doesn't work for 5.
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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.
On the gripping hand, if you're a trained programmer using vibe-coding because of a perceived increase in your productivity, or pressure from management to increase your productivity, I would refer you to my first post in this thread…
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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 this is my central response to the "AI makes software development accessible" argument.
Once upon a time anyone could program their personal computer using a book that came with it. We taught it to all the kids in my tiny town's elementary school. My shopkeep neighbor and our local mechanic wrote their own custom software with no CS background.
BASIC, Hypercard, personal computers, printed manuals > LLM's.
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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 this is nicely put.
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"planet-boiling roulette wheel" is the name of my upcoming experimental jazzcore EP
@pikesley @jonathanhogg looking forward to watching them at EMF later this year
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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.
The big problem isn't people allowing AI into their work. They should fight back, you're exactly right.
The big problem is tech bros dont care, they BOUGHT ALL the Ram, they bought ALL the hard drives on the planet.
They intend -> no choice, there will be no allow or not allow, they are building an AI prison around earth.
They bought all the hard drives.
They bought all the ram
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
AI is prison.
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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
Help us get the federated wiki there.It is more than a successor in spirit to HyperCard.
You would be surprised to learn about what #FedWiki does.
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@jarkman I can absolutely bend your ear at EMF, but conveniently I also recently gave a talk about it at Alpaca!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHD9sB7M&list=PLxqmZjMvoVzw773-Fo9ajkujFfOThuFOP&index=9
@jarkman @jonathanhogg Would love to have my ear bent about Flitter at EMF
. Are you planning to do your talk there? (I guess there’s that YouTube you posted, but I kind of like live performance 
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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
Feel free to devise non-gatekept programming -
@jarkman @jonathanhogg Would love to have my ear bent about Flitter at EMF
. Are you planning to do your talk there? (I guess there’s that YouTube you posted, but I kind of like live performance ) -
@jarkman I can absolutely bend your ear at EMF, but conveniently I also recently gave a talk about it at Alpaca!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHD9sB7M&list=PLxqmZjMvoVzw773-Fo9ajkujFfOThuFOP&index=9
@jonathanhogg Thanks! I'll absorb that and then I can ask you better questions at EMF.
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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 lazarus still exists, as a faint remanent of those times
