hollowturtle

LLMs. This month has been very busy

How we've ended up cornered in this spot as an industry? From human craft to onboarding and baby sitting agents?? That sounds just stupid. I won't be surprise to learn, after ai companies go public, that those who pushed hard for agentic coding just disappear o will push for something else. What we have produced so far of extraordinary or even just good value? Please no math conjectures or advancements, there is no field benefit in brute forcing problems

> Though I think a far more interesting thing would be whether AI given the corpus of 19th century mathematics and physics reproduce what Ramanujam or what Einstein did.

I don't think so, it was a big leap forward in terms of creativity, imagination, rigor and experimentation. Einstein was able to "run" visual thought experiments inside his mind

I have the same theory but for different reasons(commented something similar to a recent css functions thread), in this case though I don't thing you can solve it with a library, the canvas api is very limited, text layouting is very hard especially if you want to support different languages and directions. Let alone rendering a text input, if the use case is games, those usually don't have very complex inputs and that would be ok I think to implement a simpler one. IMO we should just have exposed the Skia text layout api in javascript.

Gosh how much I'd love to have a separate accessibility and text layout api like skia has and ditch the dom completely

> Because those making the standards only work on creating gimmicks.

Totally agree, but afaik we are a very small minority. My tinfoil hat theory is that all of this is intentional to keep monopolies and making it impossible to compete in the browser space

> typescript added human readability

Ehm no, added type safety, and dealing with a type checker it's exactly what agents need.

> if no human is coding

Nope outside the bubble there are many still hand coding(me too)

> I guess it will be soon that typescript won’t matter anymore since agents will be writing code is Rust

Oh hold on a second isn't Rust the same as Typescript "adding human readability"?! Why not trashing Rust and just have LLMs output WASM directly? XD Wasm which is basically useless outside the browser or some microvms on the edge, and in the browser you don't even have an interface for directly rendering anything and still have to deal with the dom

You either are highly non technical, very junior or I just don't know

All of this just for enabling the WASM use case? Why not keep supporting Deno then that is written in Rust? To me it just sounds like a technical ai journey and a blow to the go port

Then you have a skill issue :)

> Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount

To me it's just crazy of how dumb it is to test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. I'm not saying it should be perfect from day zero, let's pretend we are talking about cakes, how crazy it would sound you will tell people to try and judge your new idea of a cake you don't even know how it taste or what's inside?

> We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.

I'm ok with vibecoding scripts, I love programming the machine and making the end user happy and not dealing with bash! I don't judge scripts quality as long as they are tools in the workflow, I dont care about that, unless they will somehow be part of the production. The name Script implies that, there isn't any architecture and Claude Opus sucks at architecture

Then you're just a stranger in a land of nerds, only knowing about the history of computing you would know that coding isn't only a means to create something but it is everything. Would the Michelangelo statue have been 3D printed hold the same value? The problem is that programming got popular because it paid good salaries

Same not sure for the same reasons, to me it all sounds like a big marketing campaign for AI coding. Everywhere I read I see comments bragging about that the quality of these products output is better than us or it is usually taken for granted. Not my experience so far and I'm on the edge of AI usage

> Yes, at work, where you are paid to produce value for a business, the economics of purely hand-written code have changed

I'd love to genuinely love these blog posts but they are all the same! They're all like "now that machine are better than us $xyzargument". I'm so pissed off when I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.

> the economics of purely hand-written code have changed

who are you to know? I still hand code and produce a lot of value because I do care and polish everything I do. There are some pieces of the software that I wrote that I never touched again, they work perfectly, no errors no customer complaints

I'm always interested in projects like this. But how do I know this is not AI code? Let me explain, I read a lot AI produced code at work, when chilling on nerdy things I really wish I could read just human crafted code, for pure learning and joy, but as time goes on I've seen myself questioning more and more stuff, code, videos, even books I go check the publication date

> fewer “long T” shaped technical purists

Then we will soon forget how our airplanes works

> the value is not in the code (AI can code better than me at this point), nor even in the software architecture (AI is just getting to the point where it will get better than me)

The lies of this decade. Hopefully we will heal sooner than later

Thanks for the long detailed response I appreciate that.

One point worth mentioning is this:

> This is how I see the future of software is going to be like. Programs will be too complex to evaluate, humans will have forgotten how to write code, and the only way left is something similar to psychology as a "science" that tries to evaluate in a sandbox poking kind of way how software works.

I don't want this, and I'm pretty sure you don't want it too, like no one sane would like to have planes software written in this way. Also since you mentioned psychology I think your vision is a bit too much biased towards sci-fi, it reminds me a lot of blade runner/neuromancer and so on :) I think reality won't be as much spectacularly dystopic as in these novels.

Anyways, tangential, I've been a ui programmer for much of my life(games, web and mobile) any suggestion for where to start in reverse engineering? I have some interest in the matter

Great job! The declarative API looks sick! I'll try it. Sometimes I love to think that if our universe is really infinite, then somewhere there's a universe where the browsers supports native luajit scripting instead of javascript(and in another universe all of this plus array indexes starting from 0 ;)

Ok let's try to argue you said

> Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?

What has to do with prompting? you don't prompt for experiences like that, we are lucky that we live in a world full of authentic unexpected experiences. WTH has to do with prompting.

> 1.5 Only activities that involve creation can lead to joy.

Exactly, joy and meaning, like basically ALL psychiatrist and what not they're telling us since the start of the 21st century.

If you happen to like something that got out of a prompt, then imo you're a mediocre who doesn't know better, the same that listen to shit music, movies, games and what not. The same miserable mediocre that doom scrolls social, ingest fake news, propaganda and ai slop and doesn't know better.

I'm not saying mediocre as derogatory term to the person it's just what it is.

> The entire point of technology is to provide shortcuts.

Convenience not shortcuts, they're very different.

> Compilers are shortcuts to creativity. So are IDEs.

I argue that they're not shortcuts, but convenient ways for making you more productive. And compilers made use productive 1000x not AI that allegedly made us 10x(and it's actually not)

very badly

Thanks for clarification, I think we actually have some ground stuff we surely agree upon.

> Do you also blame a screwdriver for not being able to hammer nails into the wall? Learn the tool and how to use it, decide where it makes sense. Like you should do with all tools.

Problem is I see where everybody is going with this stuff, and since the software industry has been injected by mediocrity since a long time, they're all trying to use the screwdriver in problematic ways.

I see trends of people not caring anymore, you may argue they didn't before but the careless it's accelerating, not reading code anymore, not even opening an IDE anymore. And this hurts the industry as a whole because make managers believe they can have some expectations.

> The TDD/unit/end-to-end tests turn plausible code into deterministic code, and that's the core difference in usage.

I don't agree on this, for

1) you call it yourself "plausible" and that's a big problem cause it makes your code looks good but it's shit on a second review or in the long term. Human slop is easier to cleanup, and at least you have an attachment and know everything about the human tech debt. AI slop it's very hard to cleanup, sometimes it's cheaper to just throw it away and do it from scratch.

2) In my experience there is no amount of tdd/unit/e2e that guarantees you quality and robustness, let alone "deterministic" results. I saw 90% or more of green code coverage and the application behaving like total shit. Problem is the other trend here is letting AI writing the tests and many many times it pushes useless tests.

Instead of pushing the AI narrative that's better than capable software developers If we were honest from day one we wouldn't have all the stupid trends we have today. And that's our fault, we jumped on the AI bandwagon too early and too enthusiastically. Like we are the only category that's happy to admit that the work has been done by Claude. This is very stupid, we don't even have a self preservation instinct

Basically I see everyone accelerating towards a very negative end result and making developers useless sloperators

> Since agentic harnesses were invented, 99% of "coders" won't need to write code anymore.

Not true and

> The current revolution of AI is not about writing code. It's about (re-)designing workflows so that they're reproducible and testable.

Not true, it's all about "accellerating"(towards what and why who god knows) the code generation.

The hardness/loop thins it's just yet another pattern invention to justify agentic coding. Btw many of us still hand code, not just reading it, for assuring and be actually accountable for what we release. And i believe so many still hand code it's they won't tell for convenience

AI is a shortcut to creativity and a accellerator to lazyness. This is very well know by now, I'm not saying something crazy

> Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?

yes and has nothing to do with prompting congratulations

What are you the lawyer of the prev poster? Anyway I can rule out what it isn't, you're not creating anything what it isn't then? how can it be joy?

No i'm not entitled, but there are facts based on reality: prompting isn't creating, it's a slot(or slop) machine

So based in reality. I don't really understand people enjoying doing stuff with prompts, either they're very mediocre or there must be something else. There's also the question that usually some famous game mechanics existed because of trial and error, line after line of hand coded stuff, and patterns emerging as you see fit from the code to the test, if all you do is prompting and piling slop over slop I'm afraid what we have ahead won't be fun, in any industry really

> Making things for the joy of making them is wonderful to see.

ehm except they're not doing anything really? the real joy was getting to know the processor, write down some assembly and see the result on an emulator, that was real joy, too easy writing a prompt that god know what it generates