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Automatic Programming

antirez.com

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Re: Automatic Programming

#161

Post by nvlled »

helloplanets wrote: post #136
nvlled wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see Carmack or Torvalds doing this, so it's all good (for now).

How big of a Carmack fan are you really, if you don't know one of his most well known takes on programming? (And you definitely don't need to be a fan.) Carmack has been heavily in favor of leveraging power tools since way back. Direct quote from the man himself: > I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. > My first games involved ha…

I've seen that before. Re-reading it, I don't really get the same "vibe" as antirez's level of AI advocacy. You also conveniently omitted the last paragraph of the tweet:

> Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.

But yeah, it (almost) sounds like an ad for AI, but I like to believe it's still a measured somewhat neutral stance. The difference is that Carmack doesn't consistently post things like this unprompted, unlike antirez.

Re: Automatic Programming

#162

Post by permo-w »

jpnc wrote: post #27
dang wrote: post #194

[stub for offtopicness]

How does it feel to see all your programming heroes turn into Linkedin-style influencers?

How does it feel to read yet another unbelievably unenlightening article about LLM usage voted to the top of the frontpage for the thousandth day in a row?

Re: Automatic Programming

#163

Post by logicprog »

neochief wrote: post #83
logicprog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with GP, and so, yes, I release everything I do — code and the hundreds of thousands of painstakingly researched, drafted, deeply thought through words of writing that I do — using a public domain equivalent license (to ensure it's as free as possible), the zero clause BSD.

Is there a link?

Sure!

Personal blog: https://neonvagabond.xyz/ (591,305 total words, written over 6 years; feel free to do whatever you want with it)

My personal github page: https://github.com/alexispurslane/ (I only recently switched to Zero-Clause BSD for my code, and haven't gotten around to re-licensing all my old stuff, but I give you permission to send a PR with a different license to any of them if you wanna use any of it)

Re: Automatic Programming

#164

Post by dugmartin »

chrisweekly wrote: post #152
dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

> "using a new file is the requirements doc is so large is fills the context window" using a new file IF the requirements doc is so large IT fills the context window

I need Claude to review my HN comments.

Re: Automatic Programming

#165

Post by permo-w »

dang wrote: post #194

[stub for offtopicness]

How many times are we going to reinvent the wheel of LLM usage and applaud? Why every day is there another LLM usage article adding essentially nothing educational or significant to the discourse voted to the top of the frontpage? Am I just jaded? It feels like the bar for "Successful article on Hacker News" is so much lower for LLM discourse than for any other subject

Re: Automatic Programming

#166

Post by freestingo »

I do not agree at all with his contrasting definitions of “vibe coding” vs “automatic programming”. If a knowledgeable software engineer can say that Claude’s code is actually theirs, so can everyone else. Otherwise, we could argue that Hell has written a book about itself using Dante Alighieri as its tool, given how much we still do not know about our brains, language, creative process, etc.

Re: Automatic Programming

#167

Post by nvlled »

eddyg wrote: post #149
nvlled wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see Carmack or Torvalds doing this, so it's all good (for now).

In case you didn’t know, Linus does vibe code now: https://github.com/torvalds/AudioNoise/blob/main/README.md

Just the visualizer:

> Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding.

Also that readme is still fairly technical, no any kind of advocacy or heavy pro-AI sentiments of any kind.

Re: Automatic Programming

#168

Post by simianwords »

keyle wrote: post #108
norir wrote: post #61

> I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud. I disagree. The code you wrote is a collaboration with the model you used. To frame it this way, you are taking credit for the work the model did on your behalf. There is a difference between I wrote this code entirely by myself and I wrote the code with a partner.…

The line gets blurrier the more auto-complete you use. Agentic programming is at the end of the day a higher level auto complete, with extremely fuzzy matching on English. But when you write a block and you let copilot complete 3, 4, 5 statements. Are you really writing the code?

Truth is the highest level of autocomplete

Re: Automatic Programming

#169

Post by logicprog »

catdog wrote: post #92
jakkos wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you against copyright, patents, and IP in all forms then?

Independent of ones philosophical stance on the broader topic: I find it highly concerning that AI companies, at least right now, seem to be largely exempt from all those rules which apply to everyone else, often enforced rigorously.

I draw from this that no-one should be subject to those rules, and we should try to use the AI companies as a wedge to widen that crack. Instead, most people people who claim that their objection is really only consistency, not love for IP spend their time trying to tighten the definitions of fair use, widen the definitions of derivative works, and in general make IP even stronger, which will effect far more than just the AI companies they're going after. This doesn't look to me like the behavior of people who truly only want consistency, but don't like IP.

And before you say that they're doing it because it's always better to resist massive, evil corporations than to side with them, even if it might seem expedient to do so, the people who are most strongly fighting against AI companies in favor of IP, in the name of "consistency" are themselves siding with Disney, one of the most evil companies — from the perspective of the health of the arts and our culture — that's working right now. So they're already fine with siding with corporations; they just happened to pick the side that's pro-IP.

Re: Automatic Programming

#170

Post by wernsey »

sneak wrote: post #80
jakkos wrote: post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

If you publish your code to others under permissive licenses, people using it to do things you do not want is not something being unwillingly taken from you. You can do whatever you want with a gift. Once you release your code as free software, it is no longer yours. Your opinions about what is done with it are irrelevant.

But the license terms state under which conditions the code is released.

For example: MIT license states has this clause "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

It stands to reason that if an LLM outputs something based on MIT-licensed code then that output should at least contain that copyright because it's what the original author wished.

And I saw a comment below arguing that knowledge cannot be copyrighted, but the code is an expression of that knowledge and that most certainly can be protected by copyright.

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