rottytooth/Olympus: The language where computation happens through the will of the gods

Vibe code is legacy code | Val Town Blog

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It’s only legacy code if you have to maintain it!

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.

If you don’t understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

Vibe coding and Robocop

The short version of what I want to say is: vibe coding seems to live very squarely in the land of prototypes and toys. Promoting software that’s been built entirely using this method would be akin to sending a hacked weekend prototype to production and expecting it to be stable.

Remy is taking a very sensible approach here:

I’ve used it myself to solve really bespoke problems where the user count is one.

Would I put this out to production: absolutely not.

Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error. You can fix that yourself or you can feed the error back into the LLM and watch it correct itself.

Compare this to hallucinations in regular prose, where you need a critical eye, strong intuitions and well developed fact checking skills to avoid sharing information that’s incorrect and directly harmful to your reputation.

With code you get a powerful form of fact checking for free. Run the code, see if it works.

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow

People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.

The present wave of generative AI tools has done a lot to help us generate lots of code, very fast. The easy parts are becoming even easier, at a truly remarkable pace. But it has not done a thing to aid in the work of managing, understanding, or operating that code. If anything, it has only made the hard jobs harder.