I wouldn’t say this myself without a whole lot of asterisks, but…there is something to this line of critique for sure.
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Still, per the OP’s point, we should learn from what it is about vibe coding that really appeals to people.
The OP makes the case that we should find better abstractions and better idioms to fight boilerplate. Yes. And that we should look to things like Hypercard that reward inexperienced experimentation and exploration. Very very yes.
The latter part of my thread argues that we should •also• search for better solutions to the “Don’t make me decide! Just do something typical!” problem. I don’t know what that looks like, but we should take that problem more seriously.
@inthehands I'm just not ready to believe that the AI hype is so big because programming is too hard. I think we definitely do need easier and more creative interfaces to machines, but I don't see the regular people who would be helped by them flocking to AI. If anything, the people most excited seem to be the people who ostensibly already know how to program, or the very online techbros on websites like HN.
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@inthehands I'm just not ready to believe that the AI hype is so big because programming is too hard. I think we definitely do need easier and more creative interfaces to machines, but I don't see the regular people who would be helped by them flocking to AI. If anything, the people most excited seem to be the people who ostensibly already know how to program, or the very online techbros on websites like HN.
@inthehands Vibe coding is appealing like pulling the lever on a slot machine is appealing. Everybody wants a magic button that does what they mean. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist, and probably never will. I think there are much greater and more mundane forces at play here.
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@inthehands reducing boilerplate makes sense - and things like better libraries, better abstractions, better systems to reuse code other people already wrote so you don't have to reinvent 30 wheels every time you start a new project, etc. can help reduce that.
But - if you're programming, your decisions are the main thing that actually adds value to what you're making, from the larger scale of what language, libraries, etc. to use, down to what decisions you make in implementation details@inthehands This is kinda just how 'knowledge work' works, generally?
Making (informed) decisions is, largely, what the job is.
Which is exhausting, and difficult, and easy to burn out on, and there is always a temptation to try to cut corners, especially if you're overworked and underpaid or feel alienated from your work - look at the general state of academia, for example - but to 'solve' the problem of needing to make decisions, is really to remove the part of it that actually matter -
Still, per the OP’s point, we should learn from what it is about vibe coding that really appeals to people.
The OP makes the case that we should find better abstractions and better idioms to fight boilerplate. Yes. And that we should look to things like Hypercard that reward inexperienced experimentation and exploration. Very very yes.
The latter part of my thread argues that we should •also• search for better solutions to the “Don’t make me decide! Just do something typical!” problem. I don’t know what that looks like, but we should take that problem more seriously.
@inthehands I have enjoyed this thread so much... thank you.
I'm less convinced that there's a clear separation between thinking and typing. The history of programming language design is all about that: how do you create an expressive medium for people to *think with* in a particular domain. It's not just making it more like English. People who have the right language in their hands can do really amazing things.
To stay with the example, HyperTalk was really good because it was *so* fit-to-purpose. It didn't do anything but manipulate this tiny object model. Alan Kay bitched about it: that the smallness of the object model itself was the problem... but you and I and everyone who loved HyperCard felt differently.
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@PaulDavisTheFirst
You’ve trimming “a lot of” from my sentence, a phrase which was doing a lot of work.(I personally had been doing UI programming for 20-some years before my first experience with mobile device in J2ME, so I do hear you)
@inthehands i wasn't disputing that "a lot of [what makes UI programming hard is layout]". Layout is hard.
Just that the dfficulty really doesn't have much to do with the (relatively new) desire to make layouts work on mobile-sized devices as well as 72" HiDPI displays, though that likely adds to the problems.
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Still, per the OP’s point, we should learn from what it is about vibe coding that really appeals to people.
The OP makes the case that we should find better abstractions and better idioms to fight boilerplate. Yes. And that we should look to things like Hypercard that reward inexperienced experimentation and exploration. Very very yes.
The latter part of my thread argues that we should •also• search for better solutions to the “Don’t make me decide! Just do something typical!” problem. I don’t know what that looks like, but we should take that problem more seriously.
@inthehands " better solutions to the “Don’t make me decide! Just do something typical!” problem." ... the answer in the Hypercard case was "this is how Hypercard does it". That was pretty awesome for new programmers. But if I had tried to write Ardour with Hypercard's limitations on UI, I'd have gone crazy. So this is a bit nuanced. "Something typical" nearly always comes with a "in this context" clause, and that can make for wildly different solutions/outcomes.
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There’s a long history of people thinking that they’ve made programming easier by changing the syntax, or by making it not look like programming. That history is mostly a parade of embarrassments (COBOL! 4GLs!). One big subset of the current AI hype is just that mistake again — “vibe coding is programming in English!” — but now compounded by the nondeterminism of the tool.
Hogg’s thread correctly navigates around that mistake, focusing on •abstractions• instead of •syntax• as the problem.
@inthehands
When we do make it easier, we stop calling it "programming". Spreadsheets come to mind. -
@inthehands personally I’m baffled by the idea that we haven’t made programming easier because we haven’t tried hard enough.
There are SO many people out there trying to make stuff simpler. Like… all of them. It’s one of the most universal motivations I can come up with among software developers. It’s just fucking hard!
@ianbicking @inthehands Usually when we try making programming easier, we make some other part of it harder. Like, we went all-in on scripting languages, but it turns out strict type checking is really useful in maintenance. Same problem with vibe coding; it's easier to create, but now that you need to fix bugs and ensure it's secure and update new APIs..
Garbage collection is great, until your program gets large enough that you actually need to care about memory because you're using so much. -
I wouldn’t say this myself without a whole lot of asterisks, but…there is something to this line of critique for sure.
Jonathan Hogg (@jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)
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.
Mastodon (mastodon.social)
Gotta say I'm glad things on the street have calmed enough that you can post computer science stuff again.
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@miss_rodent @inthehands Oh sorry, I bastardized it quite a bit heh. The original one attributed to him is something like "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes".
@theorangetheme @inthehands Ah okay, I think that might be a misattribution? I can find a lot of claims *that* he said it, but, have yet to see any for *where* he said it?
(It fits his vibe, though) -
Still, per the OP’s point, we should learn from what it is about vibe coding that really appeals to people.
The OP makes the case that we should find better abstractions and better idioms to fight boilerplate. Yes. And that we should look to things like Hypercard that reward inexperienced experimentation and exploration. Very very yes.
The latter part of my thread argues that we should •also• search for better solutions to the “Don’t make me decide! Just do something typical!” problem. I don’t know what that looks like, but we should take that problem more seriously.
@inthehands "Don't make me decide" is often synonymous with "I've a messy problem and I just want to make it disappear with some of that IT fairy dust".
Standard solutions can often make problems very visible, and that's orthogonal to the sentiment above. For the people wanting their problems to disappear, a LLM coding assistant probably looks like a large pool of magic you can drown your problems in. That can be very attractive, I think.
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@ianbicking @inthehands Usually when we try making programming easier, we make some other part of it harder. Like, we went all-in on scripting languages, but it turns out strict type checking is really useful in maintenance. Same problem with vibe coding; it's easier to create, but now that you need to fix bugs and ensure it's secure and update new APIs..
Garbage collection is great, until your program gets large enough that you actually need to care about memory because you're using so much.@ianbicking @inthehands Programming computers is difficult and messy because *we're* difficult and messy. Humans. We change our needs and we require programs to adapt to changing usage and we poke and prod at the program in ways that was never intended and we want programs to match our cultural desires and then suddenly we want the opposite of our cultural desires (because schismogenesis) and now we need to enshittify it because capitalism and now there's a license change so we need to..
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Still, per the OP’s point, we should learn from what it is about vibe coding that really appeals to people.
The OP makes the case that we should find better abstractions and better idioms to fight boilerplate. Yes. And that we should look to things like Hypercard that reward inexperienced experimentation and exploration. Very very yes.
The latter part of my thread argues that we should •also• search for better solutions to the “Don’t make me decide! Just do something typical!” problem. I don’t know what that looks like, but we should take that problem more seriously.
@inthehands
When I read or hear people talking about LLM coding, I see people who don't want the "programming" part of development at all. They want to decide *what* to make, not the details around *how*.And indeed, they treat the models as workers, with themselves as the manager or product owner. They don't want to deal with the code any more than an architect wants to deal with rebar and PVC pipes.
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@inthehands Thank you! The real difficulty in programming was never the coding. It was in sufficiently and correctly understanding the problems you're trying to solve. If you understand what you want to achieve well-enough to write an English language description of everything, the coding pretty much follows.
There's a lot to be said for the dismal state of modern software dev practices these days. The "left-pad" debacle is an exemplar. As a security guy, don't let me get started on that!
@lerxst @inthehands I don't think this is fully true. A user can get something usable from "Write a Django app to track maintenance records for my cars. Target latest Python and deploy to Heroku. Ask questions until you have enough information to implement, then proceed unattended until all tests pass."
Completing this requires some idea of what's going on but not nearly the time or experience necessary to do it all by hand. I use software every day worse than what that would generate.
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There’s a second wrinkle to the OP’s critique beyond “abstractions should be better.”
The fundamental thing that makes programming hard is bridging the gap between ambiguous natural language and an unambiguous programming language. That’s hard.
That’s hard partly because the things that make a language unambiguous make such a language deeply unintuitive to humans, no matter how much it resembles English. BUT…
…the other reason it’s hard is that it forces you to decide •exactly• what you want.
the other reason it’s hard is that it forces you to decide •exactly• what you want.
Yes.
So, I came to cs from philosophy and I want to say something that a lot of programmers have dismissed as silly:
Programming isn’t hard because of the syntax. It’s hard because you have to be precise or pay the price.
In philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, the price is exacted by anal retentive logicians who smell invalidity and pounce - fallible, wet-ware compilers. And when you’ve survived their hazing programming languages are a comforting, warm embrace.
BTW, the hardest hard thing for me has always been hooking up all the systems: os, libraries, apis, services, keys, etc. these aren’t programming but the prerequisitees.
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@lerxst @inthehands I don't think this is fully true. A user can get something usable from "Write a Django app to track maintenance records for my cars. Target latest Python and deploy to Heroku. Ask questions until you have enough information to implement, then proceed unattended until all tests pass."
Completing this requires some idea of what's going on but not nearly the time or experience necessary to do it all by hand. I use software every day worse than what that would generate.
@lerxst @inthehands While I don't think this mitigates or really relates in any way to the ethics and labor power issues, I do think the use of these tools is a bit more than smoke and mirrors. The way we build software has a lot of unnecessary complexity that has no real value to anyone, yet persists because we haven't figured out a better way. Tools that allow a sketch-level instantiation of an idea are understandably popular.
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@theorangetheme @inthehands Ah okay, I think that might be a misattribution? I can find a lot of claims *that* he said it, but, have yet to see any for *where* he said it?
(It fits his vibe, though)@miss_rodent @inthehands Wouldn't surprise me heh. This is definitely the intersection of lore and apocrypha, as Einstein famously said.
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@inthehands
When I read or hear people talking about LLM coding, I see people who don't want the "programming" part of development at all. They want to decide *what* to make, not the details around *how*.And indeed, they treat the models as workers, with themselves as the manager or product owner. They don't want to deal with the code any more than an architect wants to deal with rebar and PVC pipes.
Frank Lloyd Wright said the architects greatest tool was the hammer. He used to go on-site and destroy whatever the builders did "wrong" when building his designs.
(His innovations weren't familiar to the builders.)
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@lerxst @inthehands While I don't think this mitigates or really relates in any way to the ethics and labor power issues, I do think the use of these tools is a bit more than smoke and mirrors. The way we build software has a lot of unnecessary complexity that has no real value to anyone, yet persists because we haven't figured out a better way. Tools that allow a sketch-level instantiation of an idea are understandably popular.
@lerxst @inthehands I've studied cases like HyperCard, Excel, Visual Basic, etc... I don't know what the path will be but I do think eventually we'll have something better than the current state of things. A world where ordinary non-programmers can build a rough cut of a tool with an audience of one, at low cost, and move on with their lives. Kind of the empowering spirit of the old micros and BASIC.
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Vibe coding provides a tantalizing answer in that situation: maybe it’s too varied to •abstract•, but not too varied to •plagiarize• and call it good.
This is something subtly different from abstraction. It’s not “do this in the standard way.” Instead, it’s “just rip off whatever other people are doing right now.”
A lot of people really want that — and tbh, a lot of them are not wrong to want it. I personally love the craft of programming, but let’s face it, a lot of software out there just needs to look like everything else and be done with it.
@inthehands also worth noting is the incentive structures in place in many companies. If an engineer can produce something that enables the PM to say “we got X project complete on time and under budget”, and the manager to say “look how productive my team is”, and the sales people to say “this looks great in a demo, I can sell this”, and the CFO to say “our revenue numbers look good this quarter” — then it’s a job well done. Things like correctness and tech debt have never been valued lower, and the corporate cycles have never been so compressed.
LLMs are very well-suited to that job.
