The thing about "vibe coding" is that is begins from a foundation that is "coding".
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The thing about "vibe coding" is that is begins from a foundation that is "coding".
A decade, two decades ago, there was already an ominous tendency among new people learning how to touch computers.
They wanted to learn how to make things that already existed. How to reproduce ideas that they already saw in the world.
And their instruction pandered to this desire. Tutorials on how to do this or that bog standard thing. "Code camps" and "bootcamps" that worked through regimented drills of cookie cutter concepts.
This was not programming as "planning a dinner party", to cite Hopper, navigating all the bespoke challenges of a unique circumstance. It was "coding" as assembling a licensed-IP Lego kit, the only object being to get the thing pictured on the box. It wasn't trying to solve interesting new problems, but rather trying to master the rote use of tools that were solutions to problems now forgotten.
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The thing about "vibe coding" is that is begins from a foundation that is "coding".
A decade, two decades ago, there was already an ominous tendency among new people learning how to touch computers.
They wanted to learn how to make things that already existed. How to reproduce ideas that they already saw in the world.
And their instruction pandered to this desire. Tutorials on how to do this or that bog standard thing. "Code camps" and "bootcamps" that worked through regimented drills of cookie cutter concepts.
This was not programming as "planning a dinner party", to cite Hopper, navigating all the bespoke challenges of a unique circumstance. It was "coding" as assembling a licensed-IP Lego kit, the only object being to get the thing pictured on the box. It wasn't trying to solve interesting new problems, but rather trying to master the rote use of tools that were solutions to problems now forgotten.
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A field that once was shaped by wood-workers and sculptors, each following their own muse for the art and the craft of it, became a hansa or fraternity for journeyman carpenters and apprentice brick-layers.
So, of course, when the Patented Brick-layer 4000 came along, promising to shape, and dry, and fire the bricks from raw materials even as it mortared them into place, no one questioned that all the snazzy thingamabob would do, all that it could ever do, was reproduce what came before.
Reproducing what came before is what is wanted, after all.
Sure, it doesn't reproduce what came before very well, but it's improving! It's getting better at never making anything new! Our job now is to learn how to describe only the things we already know, with such fidelity, that it can't help but do the same thing again!
It is the fulfillment of the generational shift from "What can I do with this?" to "How do I do that?"
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A field that once was shaped by wood-workers and sculptors, each following their own muse for the art and the craft of it, became a hansa or fraternity for journeyman carpenters and apprentice brick-layers.
So, of course, when the Patented Brick-layer 4000 came along, promising to shape, and dry, and fire the bricks from raw materials even as it mortared them into place, no one questioned that all the snazzy thingamabob would do, all that it could ever do, was reproduce what came before.
Reproducing what came before is what is wanted, after all.
Sure, it doesn't reproduce what came before very well, but it's improving! It's getting better at never making anything new! Our job now is to learn how to describe only the things we already know, with such fidelity, that it can't help but do the same thing again!
It is the fulfillment of the generational shift from "What can I do with this?" to "How do I do that?"
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I’ll give you a little bit of pushback on this: the process of learning a craft and developing artistry really does require a period of working through known challenges and problems, this is how the artist develops the toolkit of their craft.
I teach young musicians, and while the goal is interesting and unique artistry, first they need to learn to speak the language and develop the reflexes that make the instrument do what they intend, and that involves travelling well-worn paths.
Now, you are right that if *all* they do is mindlessly recreate by rote, they will never progress into true craftsmanship, so exploration and play need to part of the journey from the start, but the other side of the token is that *only* play is not an efficient route to mastery. Maintaining the balance is the core challenge in the art of teaching. -
I’ll give you a little bit of pushback on this: the process of learning a craft and developing artistry really does require a period of working through known challenges and problems, this is how the artist develops the toolkit of their craft.
I teach young musicians, and while the goal is interesting and unique artistry, first they need to learn to speak the language and develop the reflexes that make the instrument do what they intend, and that involves travelling well-worn paths.
Now, you are right that if *all* they do is mindlessly recreate by rote, they will never progress into true craftsmanship, so exploration and play need to part of the journey from the start, but the other side of the token is that *only* play is not an efficient route to mastery. Maintaining the balance is the core challenge in the art of teaching.@DavidM_yeg @beadsland I'll give both of you some pushback.
Software development has never been "art" or "craft"; it's science. The former terms are for hobbyists, and such attitudes have kept measurement definition/development underutilized. This has led to over 8000 programming languages, without empirical evidence of efficacy, and lessor numbers of processes to the same effect. -
@DavidM_yeg @beadsland I'll give both of you some pushback.
Software development has never been "art" or "craft"; it's science. The former terms are for hobbyists, and such attitudes have kept measurement definition/development underutilized. This has led to over 8000 programming languages, without empirical evidence of efficacy, and lessor numbers of processes to the same effect.Ooof… sorry, I don’t buy that. The prejudice that craft is somehow not rigorous or is just for hobbyists is not well-founded. Craft is the intersection of science and human, honed through relentless experimentation and analysis. The luthier, or carpenter, or architect who disregards science fails, yet their pursuit is not purely science or knowledge, but its application to human need and aspiration. Programming is not just machines, code, algorithm, but information science applied to human need and aspiration. Complaining that there are over 8,000 programming languages sounds suspiciously like complaining that there are over 7,000 spoken languages in the world and suggesting that the world would be better without that diversity.
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Ooof… sorry, I don’t buy that. The prejudice that craft is somehow not rigorous or is just for hobbyists is not well-founded. Craft is the intersection of science and human, honed through relentless experimentation and analysis. The luthier, or carpenter, or architect who disregards science fails, yet their pursuit is not purely science or knowledge, but its application to human need and aspiration. Programming is not just machines, code, algorithm, but information science applied to human need and aspiration. Complaining that there are over 8,000 programming languages sounds suspiciously like complaining that there are over 7,000 spoken languages in the world and suggesting that the world would be better without that diversity.
Developing Mitchell's point further, Dijkstra's dream was always aspirational folly.
Your own argument undermines your thesis (if your playful winking emoji hadn't preemptively subverted it already). It never was a science, for had it been, there would have been more efficacious utilization of measurement all along. Hobbyists couldn't have prevented that.
(To push back on David a smidgen, craft may be founded at the intersection of science and human(ities) [science is no less human than other forms of inquiry], but craft is not science, per se. Not all experimentation and analysis is scientific method, nor ought it be. An individual craftsperson, if so inclined, may contribute to the ongoing project of science, but this is incidental to craft itself.)
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Developing Mitchell's point further, Dijkstra's dream was always aspirational folly.
Your own argument undermines your thesis (if your playful winking emoji hadn't preemptively subverted it already). It never was a science, for had it been, there would have been more efficacious utilization of measurement all along. Hobbyists couldn't have prevented that.
(To push back on David a smidgen, craft may be founded at the intersection of science and human(ities) [science is no less human than other forms of inquiry], but craft is not science, per se. Not all experimentation and analysis is scientific method, nor ought it be. An individual craftsperson, if so inclined, may contribute to the ongoing project of science, but this is incidental to craft itself.)
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Indeed, your thousands of programming languages hyperbole (your number better reflecting the sum total of all spoken and programming languages tallied together as single category) serves to illustrate why even the academic discipline of "computer science", held captive to the imaginations of the mathematicians (and their disciplinary fiefdoms) who first had use for these machines, is a pretty affectation.
Programming is communication. It is about describing and explaining what tasks one seeks to have accomplished in a mode that is both actionable by the recipient of that communication and inspectable by those curious is to what is or has been done and how it might be done differently.
The earliest uses of programming, to perform mathematical tasks of ballistics and astronomy and census tallies, lead to a conflation of the scientific tasks to which programming was directed with the meta-task that is programming, itself. Programming can be and is used as a means for the doing of science, because communication has always been used to do science, but to confound the means with the method is category error.
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Indeed, your thousands of programming languages hyperbole (your number better reflecting the sum total of all spoken and programming languages tallied together as single category) serves to illustrate why even the academic discipline of "computer science", held captive to the imaginations of the mathematicians (and their disciplinary fiefdoms) who first had use for these machines, is a pretty affectation.
Programming is communication. It is about describing and explaining what tasks one seeks to have accomplished in a mode that is both actionable by the recipient of that communication and inspectable by those curious is to what is or has been done and how it might be done differently.
The earliest uses of programming, to perform mathematical tasks of ballistics and astronomy and census tallies, lead to a conflation of the scientific tasks to which programming was directed with the meta-task that is programming, itself. Programming can be and is used as a means for the doing of science, because communication has always been used to do science, but to confound the means with the method is category error.
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Also, an aside on "Programming is not just machines, code, algorithm, but information science applied to human need and aspiration."
To make my disparagement of "coding" all the more clear. Programs are not "code", except in the lazy, incurious, sense that "coders" talk about what they are doing (or else the highly technical sense of the cultural linguist, which would be anathema to any CS professor adamant that programming languages aren't languages). ASCII and EBCDIC are codes: substitution cyphers. Postal codes encode geographic locations. Bar codes and discount codes map to the objects or actions they identify. Codes are only ever references to what they encode.
Even machine opcodes are and were never true code. The hexadecimal is barely a gloss of the binary, as the binary remains implicit in the more compact form, which binary diagrams specific configurations of signal flows. When we telescope out to the further gloss of assembly designations (only meaningfully read as the syntactical construct of operation and operand, together), we can readily see how those binary strings are inflected for the same operation to be performed across different grammatical modes. See spot. Saw spot. Seeing spot run. The referent is not contained to any one encoding.
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Also, an aside on "Programming is not just machines, code, algorithm, but information science applied to human need and aspiration."
To make my disparagement of "coding" all the more clear. Programs are not "code", except in the lazy, incurious, sense that "coders" talk about what they are doing (or else the highly technical sense of the cultural linguist, which would be anathema to any CS professor adamant that programming languages aren't languages). ASCII and EBCDIC are codes: substitution cyphers. Postal codes encode geographic locations. Bar codes and discount codes map to the objects or actions they identify. Codes are only ever references to what they encode.
Even machine opcodes are and were never true code. The hexadecimal is barely a gloss of the binary, as the binary remains implicit in the more compact form, which binary diagrams specific configurations of signal flows. When we telescope out to the further gloss of assembly designations (only meaningfully read as the syntactical construct of operation and operand, together), we can readily see how those binary strings are inflected for the same operation to be performed across different grammatical modes. See spot. Saw spot. Seeing spot run. The referent is not contained to any one encoding.
Remarkably apropos:
"There's this concentrated push in 1960s Cold War America to make the language of music theory more like a hard science and less like an art: to return it to the mathematical purity of the quadrivium. From this harmony in numbers developed the musical scale of today.
"Composer-theorist Milton Babbitt would try and make testable statements about musical compositions and Benjamin Boris took that a step further and attempted to use formal logic to make meaningful musical statements. Not sure if he succeeded but that does look impressive."
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Remarkably apropos:
"There's this concentrated push in 1960s Cold War America to make the language of music theory more like a hard science and less like an art: to return it to the mathematical purity of the quadrivium. From this harmony in numbers developed the musical scale of today.
"Composer-theorist Milton Babbitt would try and make testable statements about musical compositions and Benjamin Boris took that a step further and attempted to use formal logic to make meaningful musical statements. Not sure if he succeeded but that does look impressive."
Had a chance to watch this through this morning… excellent, well-made video, thanks for sharing.
A lot of the points made aren’t exactly new, and yet since - as he points out - the purpose of ‘classical’ music and ‘music theory’ has a distinctly supremacist element in north america, critiques and new directions have found it difficult to gain a foothold. This is a long-standing battle. I was reminded of James Tenney’s Meta (+) Hodos (1961) and META Meta-Hodos (1975) and “Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music” (1980) that searched for and proposed a grounding for a more universal approach to music based on gestalt theory and gets some way there (unfortunately gestalt theory comes with some of the same baggage and emerged from the same cultural stew as Schenker, so…). At least it was an attempt that acknowledged and tried to reconcile musics beyond the western canon.
