adamddev1

I ask because I think there's a huge difference between the two.

People making end-user applications might think they can tolerate more errors and bloat from AI.

Just because they can get away with doing that with AI (and that's debatable) does not mean that people can also get away with that in developing tools, libraries, languages etc. The errors, bloat and instability bubbles up exponentially as people build on it.

There seems to be this fallacy of "I don't have to write code anymore, therefore nobody will have to write code anymore."

Are you writing code for end-user applications, or for tools or libraries that other stuff is built with?

Great article. Yes, often what's needed are better (rock-solid) abstractions that we can manipulate around quickly and confidently (think Abelson/Sussman SICP style), not a machine that can take good guesses at piles of spaghetti code.

Yes, I agree. I'm just trying to be charitable for the sake of the argument. I think it's better to make nothing with AI.

In this whole discussion of what can be done with AI, I think a lot of people are missing the distinction between:

A. making consumer end-user apps, basic enterprise applications (making end products)

B. making tooling, libraries, languages (making things people build on top of)

What is the "software engineering" that AI will replace? A? Or both A and B?

Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites, does NOT meant that therefore people can get away with doing all software engineering with AI. B products require a whole other level of quality, stability, and extensibility.

I'm not saying doing A with AI is a good idea either, I just think that it's a fallacy to say that because you can do A with AI, you can do B.

The author talks about how Haskell needs to catch up to stay relevant in "the AI era."

> That means taking AI seriously as a first-class user of the ecosystem.

Honestly for me any time a language or a tool markets itself as "for the AI era" or takes agents seriously as first class users, I run. It's a bad smell for me.

I'm happy that there are things like Haskell that are still focussed on correctness and sanity, and not pandering to the AI psychosis driven on by the market.

I am really disturbed by this ideological framing of "it's the AI era now" "we have to let the agents run" "speed, speed, speed" "if you don't learn to engineer with random garbage, you will be left behind!!"

Some of us will need to leave the cult of the empire of AI and live in caves like the desert fathers, committed to actually crafting correct things.

I think the big thing is that Lisp is (aside from mutable variable assignment) basically all declarative, rather than the imperative paradigm.

Even without static types, and even allowing macro craziness, there's just such a stronger baseline of declarative and functional thinking, you're off to such a good start in clearer thinking and reasoning about a program.

That sounds like people who don't understand anything about the messiness at the boundaries of the program. Just because there's a type defined, it doesn't mean that the data from the outside world will fit that type.

I found https://surge.sh to be a nice version of this kind of thing. Just go into a folder and type `surge` and there you go.

Now I'm just waiting for DependentTypeScript :-)

I'm a Haskell and FP nerd as well. I just meant the argument and the popularity inside the JS/TS world, which is fairly significant. I think the world is a better place because of the widespread adoption of TS over JS.

Remember when people would argue about how types weren't worth the effort?

I love TypeScript, if nothing else for how it's been able to popularize types.

It's a fork of Gitea. I am very happy with it.

Self-hosted. It runs great on a tiny VPS with other services. But I did have to get a cheaper Hetzner server (5 Euros-ish for 4GB RAM) to run the runner.

Forgejo feels like a refreshing blast from the past. No intrusive AI cramming. The Web Interface is snappy and responsive, not waiting for constant loaders and spinners. It takes almost no resources to run.

Excellent anecdote. I'm not sure if you're making a judgement about their behavior at the team event.

I'm an English native speaker, new in Germany, and learning German. I personally find it really annoying and awkward when other foreigners come into German social situations and expect or push them to speak English.

- What right do I have as the foreigner to intrude and get them to speak English?

- Social life in another language has it's own shared culture, jokes, and social cues. It's not fair or realistic to make people give that all up because some foreigner walked near the circle.

- It's my problem that I'm not yet fluent. It's not their problem that they're not speaking English.

- Some people are shy about their English skills, and they do not want to be pushed to speak English in front of others, in a group social setting.

- If you want exposure and practice, these are the golden opportunities! Take a humble learners position. Be quiet, understand as much as you can, and say what little bits you can, in German, not in English. Then study, study, study as much as you can in your time alone.

I hear fellow foreigners bemoaning the fact that they can't speak German yet, but these same people will inadvertently push English into every social situation they walk into. This just doesn't work. If you want to learn the language of the land, you have to let them speak it.

I find Germans are incredibly friendly and welcoming, especially when you come in humbly, trying to learn, and don't push everyone to speak English.

I'm done. Moving to Forgejo. It's wonderful and everything works better.

Seriously like everything is instant when you click around, and CI with a runner works beautifully. (The documentation for setting up the runner could be a tad clearer but otherwise everything was so painless.)

What a beautiful website.

It would be nice if they would at least say __unintelligable__ when they couldn't get things, but alas. I also notice it with YouTube auto generated subtitles and translations. They misrepresent SO much.

These AI Note-Takers can also mangle the summaries. A few weeks ago I read anecdotes here about a doctor getting completely wrong information about a patient, and a manager getting upset because he was depending on a summary of something a client never said or agreed to, but the AI summary said he did. These things are downright dangerous.

Now come the replies saying, "as if human note-takers never made mistakes!"

I agree 100%. I was just trying to say people can sort of get away with more, or justify it easier.

That's why I say, just don't use LLMs.

I think conceptualizing and refining the abstraction is the essence of the beauty of the craft and progress.

Of course Windows is garbage. But this is the sort of defeatist argument that always shows up among both AI optimists and places where corruption is rampant. Corruption and incorrectness is established as an inescapable baseline, and then greater systematic corruption (like LLMs producing constantly sub-par code) is justified.

exactly, it seems like people run away when a tool becomes heavily AI developed.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't AI agents replacing the coding mostly being done on the outer layers of development? I mean, end user applications, apps, dashboards, business applications? On this "outer crust" people can maybe tolerate things with 99% accuracy, or bloated code. A vibe coded app can be argued to be "good enough." (Even then, look at the disaster that Microsoft apps have become post AI adoption.)

But people are still staying away from LLMs on the critical compilers, frameworks, tools and libraries that people need to really rely on. No one wants to build on code that is 99% accurate or bloated. No one wants to use an AI coded web browser. To really build good building materials, you need to code it and know what you're doing. Where is anybody even getting close to phasing out coding in those critical areas?

Do you mean that to implement the same features, the agents write 2-3 times as much code as a human would write before?

What's the "tiger book?"

I thought this was about writing proofs with RPG the programming language and I was intrigued.

To make it clear that it is with an RPG (role playing game) it needs an "an" in the title.

There's a lot of good descriptions and observations on this article. But I don't like this language that just assumes we all use AI, we've all pulled away from the code. It all seems to be part of the collective brainwashing and psychosis that says "it's a new age now, everyone is doing it this way."

> It’s less coding than it used to be, or a different kind of coding. More describing and steering and deciding, less typing the actual lines.

Lots of us are still coding. A lot of the beloved infrastructure all these vibe-coded rocket rides are built with is still being hand coded by humans who care and want to build solid, good things.

Weird. I remember hearing about how one of they key markers for longevity was exposure to heat and cold.

"If it runs, it runs," is an very naive and irresponsible view of code.