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We were the agents for the models all along, with our highly adaptive tools: versatile sausagey appendages and flapping fleshy orifices for interacting with the world

The problems are ownership and provenance mainly, and that all DOM access is slow and requires syncing code internally.

Anyone can write code that tweaks nodes or uses templating, but doing it in a consistent way on a project with hundreds of thousands linea of code is challenging, especially if you also need performance and everyone's least favourite child: accessibility.

Sure you don't get some of this with frameworks, but they help a lot.

I agree, but certainly language constraints or features make analysis easier (and some analysis which was previously impossible now suddenly is) which in turn unlocks/enables a whole world of optimisations the compiler can do for you!

My mum calls them cat kisses, and we do it with other cats too, lol!

I'm not a fan of tailwind, but isn't it whole point that unused utilities don't get compiled into the final CSS?

Ah, I meant the site design as a whole when I talked about attention to detail, not the animation specifically

As for the animations...

The second animation is a bit more... High fidelity in some areas? I don't know what to even call it. The clash of different pixel art styles is what I find jarring[^1].

But I guess my point was that neither animation is even _good_... Like both of them barely pass a cursory glance; there's lot of nonsense going on in both of them, that wouldn't get past any animator. So, I wouldn't say one is better or worse; they just different

[^1]: Edit for context, I used and even made _a lot_ of pixel art in primary school and my teens lol

The animation is more dense and busy. Not sure I'd qualify it as better necessarily.

But this thread is a bit like the "I could have drawn that" comment you hear from Average Joe saying about a Mondrian painting. Yes, you can mimic something (with or without AI) but you wouldn't have made _this_.

Don't get me wrong the 0->1 copycat site is impressive, but it lacks a lot of attention to detail the original has.

The art and engineer snob voice in me is also causing a bit of cognitive dissonance about this though. C'est la vie, funny times we live in

If people in this thread found out how concept art gets painted /composed digitally for quick mood/vibe iterations, they'd lose their shit probably.

Edit: my point is different techniques are fine in different contexts

> No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper.

As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us.

On you other two points: I kinda feel you, but I'm finding ways of enjoying my work with AI. It's been a bit of a shift and I'm still adjusting probably, but it feels like it's getting better. I never really enjoyed "typing" code, but the creative process of designing solutions and building the. And I never thought typing was the "building" part, it was just an unavoidable mechanical "obstacle" (not using the word obstacle as a bad thing necessarily, but idk it's just typing you know?)

I find it funny that it's also on /post lol

But historically, I don't think people engaged as much intellectually or mentally as much as we do today. And I'm not just talking about people who need to do it at work, but even "mundane" things like watching TV or Film.

Heck, I have non-stem friends for which "pop culture" activities like wordle, pub quizzes, and film/TV are the most engaging thing intellectually. I'm not sure what they would have done if they live in the past. Would they find something else?

Very tangentially related but I've seen the word escapism used a couple of times in this thread...

I can't tell what's happening here...

Did we all extract a different conclusion/meaning from the piece?

Did a bunch of people discover the same new word recently, and are learning to use it?

Did people not read the full post perhaps, and jumped to conclusions?

I don't think the author is advocating or engaging in escapism here... Did I misunderstand the post?

Read the book Mind Illuminated. Visualisation isn't really necessary for meditation

I think it honestly not even a signal of how good anymore. It's become noise in my experience..

I've worked with an absolute leetcode beast and had a masters in CS. He insisted we use Redis for a project with a lot of relational data. We ended up building a mini relational database on top of redis. Whatever you're imagining about the dev experience, it was worse. He was a lead/senior engineer at the company. Turns out he never bothered to properly learn SQL because he didn't like it. C'est la vie, ggs I guess.

One of the best engineers I worked with was a biochemist who fell in love with programming through chance.

Most of the people I admired in the industry are self taught and passionate about the craft; a lot of them are also immigrants who didn't have access to prestigeus unis. Some went to uni but admit they've been programming since before that.

You can't really learn to be passionate about the craft and to enjoy learning at any uni.

Gosh, I must be doing something wrong. I spent 15 minutes (of which a lot was waiting while it was thinking about "backwards rationalising" it's decision and "gaslighting"[1]) arguing with it over why it keeps using `node -e "console.log(require('fs').readdirSync('…'))"` instead of `ls -l …`.

Like it did everything:

- this is not a Linux system (true, it was macOS) - it is not an available command - the binary is corrupted - node/js is more precise - V8 JavaScript is faster than bash (true technically??? But not in this context lol) - JavaScript is more versatile

I forgot what else we went through but there were a few more things. I indulged it because it was incredulous and funny. The prompts from my side were all questions, never instructions. I assume an instruction would've helped here, but also I don't think Opus ever did this (but on the other hand Opus wrote python scripts to format/indent, instead of just running cargo fmt, so I guess potato potato)

Gosh, that seems like a conclusion someone came to using AI lol.

I agree that intuition is important, and that it's sometimes easier to develop correct intuition without a conflicting bias/habit, BUT... I don't think traditional engineering skills conflict with using AI tools. If anything it's more important, but maybe that's just the recently sprouted gay hair on my head talking

Lol... I noticed it does weird stuff sometimes. I'll see it generate a python script inline on the CLI to edit files. Like... Yo what the fuck? It literally used the edit tool until 5 turn ago.

Also, it'll run a formatter, read, edit to undo auto formatting and then continue on its merry way. What is the point of that??? Lol

What?

It's an algorithm (albeit an expensive one) designed to produce engaging output. It's not a doctor, it's definitely not more capable than experts in their fields. It's not replacing anyone, same way pocket calculators didn't replace people 50 years ago.

Unless you're being sarcastic because of all the fearmongering in news? In that case, the joke went over my head lol

The achievements of thousands of of agents vibe coding in parallel. Marvellous, simply marvellous. And the news fearmonger how AI will replace jobs. Lol

I'm 99% sure my old boss was pasting Slack messages in and out of ChatGPT. Some people are feral with this AI bullshit

Yes, but if chokemegently420 on some random sub Reddit gave them that advice, nobody would be the wiser. It's not like ChatGPT is a certified clinician

Don't you lose really users by making it easy for bots to complete a sign up, but hard for humans?

It's not much to go on by, but I kinda feel ya. I think one exception I'd perhaps make is doing a large mechanic refactor. I find them incredibly daunting. So, I'll just ask AI for that. I mean it probably takes me a similar time to do, but it feels less daunting.

I've been trying to get into agentic coding and there are non-refactoring instances where I might reac for it (like any time I need to work on something using tailwind; I'm dyslexic and I'd get actual headaches, not exaggerating, trying to decipher Tailwind gibberish while juggling their docs before AIs came around)

If I'm very tired (after I had insomnia for two or so days) I have mild hallucinations, and they're pretty boring/benign. But mine are more auditory than visual.

This isn't unusual when people are sleep deprived though. I think lots of people just don't realise they are hallucinating in that state

"Be gay; do crimes" has a new twist

The thing is, the development timeline is so compressed that you lose intimate knowledge of the codebase. Like, I don't think humans can form memories that detailed that quickly? Maybe it's just a me problem though. Anyway, so when you need to debug or fix stuff, AI's reasoning will be "welp makes sense, I suppose" and your mental mood of the codebase is now slippery. Eventually there comes a time where at best you can draw an incoherent high-level diagram of the architecture.

And AIs solution to problem is generally "more of the same" to fix it. It rarely looks at fixing design problems

Memory _is_ data at the level Rust works. It just has a few abstractions in the stdlib that hide this. And the code you highlighted is taking steps in the "let's add abstraction" direction

It frequently gets indentation wrong on projects, then tries to write sed/awk scripts. Can't get it right, then write a python script that reformats the whole file on stdout, makes sure the indentation is correct, then writes requests an edit snippet.

And you might be thinking. Well, you should use a code formatter! But I do!

And then you might say, well surely you forgot to mention it in you AGENTS/CLAUDE file. Nope, it's there, multiple times even in different sections because once was apparently not enough.

And lastly, surely if I'm watching this cursed loop unfold and am approving edits manually, like some bogan pleb, I can steer it easily... Well, let me tell ya... I tried stopping it and injecting hints about the formatter, and it stick for a minute before it goes crazy again. Or sometimes it rereads the file and just immediately fucks up the formatting.

I think when this shit happens, it probably uses like 3x more tokens.

For a Rust project, it recently stated analysing binaries in the target as directory a first instinct, instead of looking at the code...

Good grief.

Honestly, I thought it was a skill issue too, but it just turns out I wasn't using it enough.

I started a new job recently, so I'm asking it a lot of questions about the codebase, sometimes just to confirm my understanding and often it came up with wrong conclusions that would send me down rabbit holes only to find out it was wrong.

On a side project I gave it literally a formula and told it to run it with some other parameters. It was doing its usual "let me get to know the codebase" then a "I have a good understanding of the codebase" speech, only to follow it up with "what you're asking is not possible" I'm like... No, I know it's possible I implemented it already, just use it in more places only to get the same "o ye ur right, I missed that... Blabla"

Yeah, it's gotten pretty bad...

Curious, what do you normally use? I had to write a few timing sensitive MC drivers and the only way I knew how onto do that reliably was using assembly. But granted, it wasn't _often_, just more than I expected (especially for someone who doesn't normally do that low level stuff, this was for an art project)