Isn’t this a question of how much the “terrorised survivors” spend on tokens to make the output “canonised”?
I think the main argument that the billions spent are not going to be recouped is accurate, but I strongly suspect the cost of producing high quality code will remain the same -just being produced faster (speed, cost, quality - you still only get to pick two)
If one Steve Yegge can burn tokens in “Gas Town” that cost as much as me and ten others then you have saved my salary but spent it on Steve’s token use for roughly the same code quality as me steve and ten others would have produced in three months - just it took steve three days
Same price, faster delivery. Is that a win ? I suspect that facebooks recent announcement (“we cannot think of enough things to do with software so who wants our GPUs?” Might suggest that it’s a business model problem more than a software probkem
Good analysis. Infact, there's collaboration cost in AI when it comes to quality, but a much smaller team can put out same quality things in a shorter time. As such it's same quality for cheaper, for sure.
"There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive.""
Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
That quote also resonated with me. It reminded me of "Perl, the write-only language"-meme of yore.
And I think there is a place for perl, just like there is a place for bash one-liners.
The authors example is personal software. The things we write to scratch our own little itches, that do not need to be shared or developed together with other people.
There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1]
The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most, of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel functions in an XSLX file, with no tests, no source control, no PRs, and no real planning behind it. And it works for that one specific task that the person who built it needed at the time.
AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground between that stuff and 'real' code - it does more than just building somehting to complete today's task, and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it, but it doesn't really look that way to someone used to working on 'proper' software.
> AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground [..] and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it
To me 'accretive work' means something you do at a lower level than your task at hand which by itself doesn't count progress, but rather lay the groundwork for it so it's compounding from there on. AI has nothing to do with this.
There might be some relevance to the term reverse centaurs. I dont know if I buy it but it might take off as useful terminology.
A blog post loosely summarized as "HEY REMEMBER WHEN I COINED THAT TERM HERE ARE THE LINKS TO ALL THE TIMES I USED THE TERM AND HERES A NEW ANECODOTE ABOUT THE TERM" screams that its trying to force the use, and therefore the posters relevance.
I don't think it has something "profound" to say, but it also is a good article worth the read.
It's mostly about why some people enjoy working with AI ("I get to build things I can use, that I couldn't build otherwise!)" and others don't ("This code is all slop and nobody understands it, and it makes me sad")
It touches a little bit about those two perspectives in general, which he calls centaurs (in charge of the work) and reverse centaurs (the work is in charge of them)
So many of the articles I've read are like this—some of them feel as though AI gets mentioned out of the blue. I think you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. The ideas are still good, the author is just distracted.
Isn’t this a question of how much the “terrorised survivors” spend on tokens to make the output “canonised”?
I think the main argument that the billions spent are not going to be recouped is accurate, but I strongly suspect the cost of producing high quality code will remain the same -just being produced faster (speed, cost, quality - you still only get to pick two)
If one Steve Yegge can burn tokens in “Gas Town” that cost as much as me and ten others then you have saved my salary but spent it on Steve’s token use for roughly the same code quality as me steve and ten others would have produced in three months - just it took steve three days
Same price, faster delivery. Is that a win ? I suspect that facebooks recent announcement (“we cannot think of enough things to do with software so who wants our GPUs?” Might suggest that it’s a business model problem more than a software probkem
Good analysis. Infact, there's collaboration cost in AI when it comes to quality, but a much smaller team can put out same quality things in a shorter time. As such it's same quality for cheaper, for sure.
"There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive.""
Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
>>> Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Fantastic
That quote also resonated with me. It reminded me of "Perl, the write-only language"-meme of yore.
And I think there is a place for perl, just like there is a place for bash one-liners.
The authors example is personal software. The things we write to scratch our own little itches, that do not need to be shared or developed together with other people.
There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1]
The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most, of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel functions in an XSLX file, with no tests, no source control, no PRs, and no real planning behind it. And it works for that one specific task that the person who built it needed at the time.
AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground between that stuff and 'real' code - it does more than just building somehting to complete today's task, and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it, but it doesn't really look that way to someone used to working on 'proper' software.
[1] Further reading if you're interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048672
> AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground [..] and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it
To me 'accretive work' means something you do at a lower level than your task at hand which by itself doesn't count progress, but rather lay the groundwork for it so it's compounding from there on. AI has nothing to do with this.
Guys really pushing to remain relevant with the reverse centaurs shtick.
Since when did the distinction between use-cases stop being relevant?
There might be some relevance to the term reverse centaurs. I dont know if I buy it but it might take off as useful terminology.
A blog post loosely summarized as "HEY REMEMBER WHEN I COINED THAT TERM HERE ARE THE LINKS TO ALL THE TIMES I USED THE TERM AND HERES A NEW ANECODOTE ABOUT THE TERM" screams that its trying to force the use, and therefore the posters relevance.
First time I’ve heard it as a phrase, and it seems to be a useful label. What’s annoying you about it?
Guy is not just annoying but flat out wrong again and again. But he speaks the language many want to hear.
It could be that this person has something profound to say, but ... it's about AI. Sigh and swipe left.
I don't think it has something "profound" to say, but it also is a good article worth the read.
It's mostly about why some people enjoy working with AI ("I get to build things I can use, that I couldn't build otherwise!)" and others don't ("This code is all slop and nobody understands it, and it makes me sad")
It touches a little bit about those two perspectives in general, which he calls centaurs (in charge of the work) and reverse centaurs (the work is in charge of them)
So many of the articles I've read are like this—some of them feel as though AI gets mentioned out of the blue. I think you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. The ideas are still good, the author is just distracted.
Even if they're saying something bad about it?
That feels overly reductive