241–250 of 281 posts
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I like the image. It was simple.
But doesn't that make it bad? It doesn't say anything new. Unlike the software in question, which is personalized, so it's not even symbolically reflecting the topic. It's a sheer waste of pixels and time spent looking at it or scrolling past the cognitive junk food.
I mean, I'm a gwern fan, but...can't you just let people enjoy things?
Semi-honest question: What do you need a window manager, code editor, chat app, etc for if claude is so awesome that it can do everything for you? Why spend 400$ on making tools that you wont use in any workflow because the only workflow that will be left is prompting and agent to run in a loop
"Computer. Run program Riker omega six."
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But if people are so busy, when are they planning to use their suite of bespoke software anyway? Like isn't this all about recreation anyway? This blog post certainly seems to be that at least. Is this really all about spending money on AI to write something that you then are using just for job? Because, apparently, you have no time otherwise? If its not for fun, what's it for? It doesn't really seem like anyone is m…
> But if people are so busy, when are they planning to use their suite of bespoke software anyway? The original blog post, and the ensuing discussion, is about creating software that fits your specific requirements, for the purposes of daily use. As for using vim, the author did, for 20 years. The article discusses that in detail.
Further, the article does not mention "requirements," it mentions the "joy" of having software "fit" just you. It goes through I think a certain amount of care in the writing to say they are enabled by their system only insofar as there is a "satisfaction" to not dealing with something from without that is for a more general audience.
At the end of the day, life is what you spend time doing. I don't think the author or anybody really thinks cumulative time is saved one way or the other here. This is all a product of what we want to spend time doing. And I am just saying, that's recreational! It doesn't have to be the case that something is lesser if its not about maximizing productivity or making more money. Either you have a "decades-long" project configuring a system, or your spending a decade writing new software for you, that's a "quiet pleasure to use." It's clearly either way about the project of it. Do we really think anyone is going to vibe code a vim clone and, insofar as they use it, not continue to tinker with it? Isn't that like the whole upshot here? That you can make things forever?
A guy who uses i3/sway and rolls their own DE even before vibe coding world is already a particular kind of person with certain priorities and judgements about time! And that's cool! I am that kind of guy, fwiw.
A lot of people into the synthesizers and related stuff talk about so-called "gear acquisition syndrome," where, in the search for hardware that fits their "requirements" as serious musicians, the time (and money) they end up spending just getting new things ends up eclipsing time doing the actual thing (making music). Depending on how much money they have, this doesn't necessarily become bad, one just realizes they are maybe a synth collector more than a composer.
Even if I had all the AI money token blah blah in the world, I would still hesitate spending time rebuilding an IDE or editor on my weekends, because for me personally, that's time getting in the way of using the computer to make my things. Like I am hungry, I do not want to forge my own chef's knife first, but I do think the people that do have a kinda cool hobby! Or, if its about spending my weekend making an OS so that I can, come Monday, read work emails exactly how I want, well that just terrible to me but everyone has their own work-life balance I think.
Again, I am not trying to explain away or I guess be negative here. There are lots of kinds of people, that's ok! I think it's just interesting how we know traffic concepts of "time" and "productivity" and "serious computer work vs. recreational computer stuff" these days!
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I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…
I think a notable difference is that the AI that is portrayed in most sci-fi (that I have read/watched anyway) tend to be "logical machines" that act deterministically based on the data available to them. What we got are "statistical machines" that tend to do the right thing under the right conditions, but can go completely off the rail every now and then. The former are more akin to a generalization of computers as…
We're actually going to have hammers designed by blacksmiths, not by comittee.
Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full…
I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…
And before you say "oh but these are just stochastic parrots and this is really stolen code" - well the jury is stil out, but currently companies don't have these kind of problems, so I expect that anyone will be able to go "my claude did it so I declare it to be Free software".
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Software made for one, made by LLMs which regurgitate the average of existing tools, are going to have more security issues, not less.
But how would you exploit them when every one of them is subtly different? With software that's deployed to millions of computers you have an abundance of targets, but trying to target some random LLM average todo list at scale is hard, isn't it?
At day 9, right as he is getting ready to deploy his beautifully crafted shell code, the clock hits midnight UTC. The website shuts down for maintenance.
"This is it" he thinks. "As soon as the backups finish I'm getting in. No problem."
Minutes tick by. He gets up, stretches, sits back down, watches the clock impatiently. Then, as he prepares to start refreshing the site he recollects, "I'm glad I begged so hard to get authorization to use this PHP 0day."
His partially obscured terminal window has the script ready to launch, all arguments pre-populated, waiting for the link and session token to be pasted in and executed.
The site comes back up. But the url of his launch point returns 404. Undaunted, he returns to a previous url. It is also 404. He curses aloud. Beginning to perspire, he goes to the homepage and prepares to navigate back to the launch point.
The link isn't there. Well, it's there, but it has changed.
"What the....!" The link is no longer a PHP url. He mouses over other links. NO links say PHP anymore. Starting to panic, he clicks on links at random. Not a single one appears to be PHP.
The following morning he schedules an urgent meeting with his supervisor.
"How's that project coming along. Got anything yet?"
"No. I, uh...I'm going to need a bit more time."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Uh. The site. It got..." He mutes his microphone and, for the 22nd time since midnight, he screams in frustration. Unmuting, he continues:
"It got rewritten. Completely. In Nim."
"What??"
"Yeah. It's some esoteric language that just got a new web framework. I guess somebody decided they wanted to mess around with it. So they vibe coded a complete translation. The whole front end is nimlang now. None of the PHP attacks are going to work on it."
His supervisor expresses his disgust and ends the call.
11 days later the process repeats itself, this time with Rust.
The TAO engineer submits an application to change jobs to the DoD's procurement division, then requests an appointment with a mental health counselor.
I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…
I tried to make it a product, but I didn’t find much interest. Maybe I’m just bad at marketing.
With the help of Claude, it cost me years of experience and few weekends to build. So even if nobody other than me ever profits from it, it was still worth it!