It may surprise you to learn that some people actually like programming, so yes I will. If AI tools are 20x faster then I guess I'll have to use them to get paid, but I'll be damned if I start letting a computer do the fun part for me on personal projects.
That said I'm not too worried. Vibe coding is currently slower due to how bad it is at writing software. In several years companies pouring billions into improving LLMs still haven't been able to make them not suck. That suggests to me that it's a fundamental limitation of the tech at present, and won't get better until another research breakthrough happens.
These two statements can coexist. Yes, AI is amazing. And yes, it is not good enough yet to significantly speed up my work beyond research and writing tests.
The last 60 years of software gave us amazing projects, and if you go through their code, you'll see the same principles that is outlined in every good software engineering book: Good organization, hackish when needs be to resolve some accidental complexity, good comments,...
Most of those things rely on having the right mindset/philosophy first, then having a good grasp about the domain and the technologies (programming languages, platforms, libraries,...). After that you need to start thinking about the tools you used to help you (editors, test runners, static analyzers, debuggers,...). Most LLM users put the latter above all others. Like using the agent precludes knowing about the domain, the technology, and the tooling. And what philosophy? Craftmanship? Sir, here it's all about YOLO.
Are you saying this in defense of DHH? If I were trans, I would feel pretty damn unwelcome about contributing to (or even using) a project whose BDFL is posting in support of a "comedian" who says:
> If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails,
punch him in the balls.
> Most recently, five officers(!) came to arrest comedian Graham Linehan for illicit tweets. When much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question, such that the reader might imagine something far worse than what was actually said. So you should actually read the three tweets that landed Linehan in jail, and earned him a legal restraining order against using X. It's grotesque.
I hate to have to say this, because people seem pretty quick at drawing the wrong conclusions about anyone that disagrees with their very strong opinions, I'm not even saying that what DHH said is in actual support of Linehan, but sometimes acknowledging the right of assholes to say things without having the government come down on them, is not the same thing as being of the same opinion with said assholes.
And while I support everyone's right to boycott personalities that they disagree with, I dislike when that turns into a paternalistic crusade against those people through peer pressuring away anyone involved with them. Shaming other people into doing what you feel is the right thing is equally harmful, in my humble opinion, to whatever harm these personalities might effect onto the wider internet.
I was at the same place you are for a while until I realized my obsession with doing everything "right" was killing my enjoyment of programming. I read through Let Over Lambda a couple of months ago and was blown away at how deeply unmaintainable some of his code examples are, but I got inspired to start letting myself do weird unmaintainable shit while programming instead of constantly acting like my code has to pass a code review and I've found its a lot more fun.
Intellectually dishonest argumentation cannot avoid ending in falsehood. By design it grows to consume all available time.
A walled garden, if constructed in good faith, has at least the potential to find truth.
I suspect that we're really both just contrasting best-case and worst-case scenarios for our preferred positions. What ends up actually happening is a mix of both.
This seems like a lack of experience. The more I work with LLMs, the better I get at predicting what they’ll get wrong. I then shape my prompts to avoid the mistakes.
That's definiely the biggest thing I "advanced" from earlier on. Fighting others on the internet doesn't change their mind, nor is it really speaking to anyone who actually is in control. There will always be shills and haters and trolls, but that's the noise you need to filter through on the internet if you really want to seek the truth or find solidarity and start taking action.
Fighting that base instinct of "I need to call this guy out for how BS this is" was definitely a much harder issue for me than I care to admit last decade.
