> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience.
And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does, to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in the magic word wasting hours of my time, a failure that is not my fault but a failure for which I bear the negative consequences of, is infuriating enough that I am always compelled to have more understanding and eventually more control of everything I write.
Author here - I agree that to learn the best thing is to implement and fail along the way. My point was I would never professionally opt to write a sorting algorithm instead of using the builtin sort() most languages come equipped with
I think it's telling that the sculptor guy in your essay's vibe art (who resembles Fix-it Felix/The Carpenter) is completely oblivious to the fact that he just carved a foot where a hand should be.
I know the feeling. I still wonder though, am I faster? Do I understand what I’ve made as well as I used to? What have I learned? How did the experience benefit me? What value did I gain?
I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional.
The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.
While I experience a very disturbing nausea, with just a healthy bit of existential dread, whenever I read whatever these AI Bros(TM) manage to... ahem, "sculpt", you actually managed to write something not immediately recognizeable as slop. Kudos.
Points deducted for the wholly unnecessary image. Text can, after all, stand on its own.
You are, however, strongly influenced by the writings of the tool covered by your musings. Might I suggest to perhaps not indulge in such excessive hyphenation?
I feel most like I'm sculpting code when I'm working in Lisp. I can sort of feel the shape and contour of the procedure I'm creating as I work. Even when writing in something like C, I feel the feeling of "filling out a tax form". Making sure all the things in Section 1 boxes A through E are correct, because Section 6 box D depends on them being so.
Coding with AI assistance feels like what it is: outsourcing. Letting an accountant take care of the tax forms, except the accountant is Wheatley from Portal 2: a chatty, subtly below-the-threshold-of-competence robot.
Is this post "sculpted" too? It certainly looks suspiciously so. It feels disrespectful to expect people to read something you could not be bothered to write yourself.
This piece starts off making it sound like the computer is pretty much doing all the work, while the human maybe weighs in on a matter of taste once in a while, if they like, but by the end, the list of what the LLM can actually do is really short. Implementing a sorting algorithm for you, perhaps, but not necessarily one without “egregious flaws,” and really you should still use a library for that. Replacing high-quality libraries of mature software, that have tests, etc, is obviously one of the poorer uses of vibe-slop coding.
It comes down to “adding code” that attempts to, or seems to, achieve something.
> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past.
Well then I guess times haven't changed, because you still haven't written a sorting algorithm. Instead you've - at best - done a code review for one. One that based on my experience is almost certainly a shoddy, substandard implementation with the type of quality I'd be professionally embarrassed to attach my name to in a commit log.
> I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience.
And you'd have been better off, because now you've got the burden of maintaining a poorly-implemented sorting algorithm that you don't understand that's living in your codebase. What could possibly go wrong?
Further, those abstractions that you just threw away to roll your own encryption were written by actually talented people who actually took the time to think about their implementation before shitting it out into the world. The implementations you'll find in libaries will be superior in every way to the trash your LLM will pump out.
So, TL;DR: congratulations, you've just announced to the world that you're proud that you're a bad coder and that the software you're being paid to produce is getting worse.
(for those with the kind of attention span that causes them to use LLMs, maybe just skip ahead to the "this is what you sound like" section, circa 17 mins)
"Sculpting" as used here just feels like a pretentious euphemism for "vibing" as opposed to what actual sculpting is like (hint: it would be akin to... dramatic pause... writing code)
Brb, just rolled my eyes so hard that I'm now staring at my own visual cortex
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] threadAnd by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does, to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in the magic word wasting hours of my time, a failure that is not my fault but a failure for which I bear the negative consequences of, is infuriating enough that I am always compelled to have more understanding and eventually more control of everything I write.
https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling
It tracks for vibe coders.
Idk. Hoping there will be research soon.
The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.
Points deducted for the wholly unnecessary image. Text can, after all, stand on its own.
You are, however, strongly influenced by the writings of the tool covered by your musings. Might I suggest to perhaps not indulge in such excessive hyphenation?
Coding with AI assistance feels like what it is: outsourcing. Letting an accountant take care of the tax forms, except the accountant is Wheatley from Portal 2: a chatty, subtly below-the-threshold-of-competence robot.
It comes down to “adding code” that attempts to, or seems to, achieve something.
> Where things go, how pieces fit, reusable patterns - this is more question of subjective taste and big-picture thinking.
I do that, too, only I call it coding, and it doesn’t require me to rewrite a bunch of badly written slop first.
Further, those abstractions that you just threw away to roll your own encryption were written by actually talented people who actually took the time to think about their implementation before shitting it out into the world. The implementations you'll find in libaries will be superior in every way to the trash your LLM will pump out.
So, TL;DR: congratulations, you've just announced to the world that you're proud that you're a bad coder and that the software you're being paid to produce is getting worse.
Totally unrelated video I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ
(for those with the kind of attention span that causes them to use LLMs, maybe just skip ahead to the "this is what you sound like" section, circa 17 mins)
Brb, just rolled my eyes so hard that I'm now staring at my own visual cortex