91–100 of 280 posts
The most interesting problems arise when you don't try and force one shared standard upon everybody yet still try and play nice.
Alternatively, power could concentrate and the winners get to decide what is valuable and not, thus cutting down the space of possible complexity by construction.
AI replaces a single tower with millions of 5-over-1s[1]. The aggregate height, and speed of construction mind-boggling, but when each building is considered individually, not very impressive. 1. Perhaps with a handful of skyscrapers sprinkled in.
The core thesis of this essay is reminiscent of the Lisp Curse [1] / Bipolar Lisp Programmer [2]. It's been a few years since I read these, but if I recall the argument there, it was that Lisp makes it so easy to build stuff and scratch exactly your own itch, that there's no real strong push for lisp programmers to come together and collaborate to build non-trivial and general purpose artifacts. And that is why the l…
Au contraire if typescript and rust didn’t steal the whole show it’d be a great time to be a lisp LLM pilot: agents can explain pretty much everything without any confabulations nowadays, so the understanding problem essentially goes away, if you care, which is exactly the point of the article if you ask me.
What made Lisp cool and powerful goes away when you do it through an LLM.
at one point - future generations - will look at people who designed unix like tools - tools that do one thing well & compose with other tools as demigods.
I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…
The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…
It's the infinite AI monkeys at a computer keyboard phenomenon.
Or the car on the highway that bumps left and right on the guardrails until, eventually, it arrives at its destination and nearly everybody is amazed at that great success.
The AI kool-aid drinkers are going to answer: "but that's how human code too".
And I'm really not sure about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Au contraire if typescript and rust didn’t steal the whole show it’d be a great time to be a lisp LLM pilot: agents can explain pretty much everything without any confabulations nowadays, so the understanding problem essentially goes away, if you care, which is exactly the point of the article if you ask me.
But at that point why use Lisp (which LLMs have been so far still to struggle to get matching parens every now and then) What made Lisp cool and powerful goes away when you do it through an LLM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…
> "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the infinite AI monkeys at a computer keyboard phenomenon. Or the car on the highway that bumps left and right on the guardrails until, eventually, it arrives at its destination and nearly everybody is amazed at that great success.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…
Why would it? It has optimized what it was built to optimize: this is the token-selling industry. Take note that the people hawking the dream of a gold rush are not actually mining but selling shovels
What's more profitable, optimizing for inference time or optimizing to increase inference time by increasing token count?
I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…
Although I suspect models from Google, Facebook and Microsoft can be trained on their massive internal codebases. Whether they are is another question.
> But it’s not the biblical story. At Babel, the loss of common language stops construction whereas in AI-assisted engineering, construction can continue after shared understanding has already collapsed. The lack of an immediate failure is what makes it curious and a bit disorienting. The tower does not fall, and so we do not notice what was lost. It just keeps rising. I don't know whether the author thinks this is a…