I also have two levels "beneath" vibe coding:

- Power Coding: Like power armor, you describe chunks of code in English and it's built. Here you outsource syntax and stdlib, but remain in control of architecture and data flow.

- Backseat Coding: Like vibe coding but you keep peeking at the code and complaining ;)

- Vibe Coding: Total yolo mode. What's a code?

It's an interesting question: Will coding turn out to be more like landscaping, where (referring to the practice specifically of cutting grass) no one uses hand tools (to a first approximation)? Or it will it be more like woodworking, where everyone at least knows where a Stanley hand plane is in their work shop?

“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.

“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.

“You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”

The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.

We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require dozens of pages of natural language to describe the same thing.

See also: https://longestjokeintheworld.com/

That's not the reason to do ape coding. AI generated code is not innovative. If you want to build something that no one has built anything similar to then you have to ape code.

See Chris Lattner's blog where he explains the limitations of AI: https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...

I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.

(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)

You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. We don't say "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the entire concept fades to the back.

I know it's not what the thought piece is about, but it's equally accurate to say engineers are "aping in" on AI coding without doing any research. Very much the same vibe, my anti-AI friends suddenly flipped their tune to shill slopped together apps.

I expect it to go about as well as it did in crypto.

It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.

They will have very narrow to zero understanding — don't need it to fix — of shear forces, navier stokes.

They will command high rates if labor is limited(a plumber in Indonesia will commande lower ppp adjusted hourly rates than America). CS education become a subset of applied math since graduate hiring of code-plumber will require a narrower certificate to fix an AI system — which works very much like how plumber working to fix a building leak is different from a person fixing a water pipe burst under a road.

A few AI systems will become dominant, That should be a mix of Anthropics and your Googles. They will hire code plumbers to plumb together all the things they provide.

You don't have to use much brain at all as a code-plumber. You become a remote journeyman logging in and plumbing with given tools, making sure there is low back pressure(a term where load on future plumbers interacting/fixing with ai decreases) and the like.

The term was popularized when asking a computer to do it for you became the dominant form of cognition. "Ape thinking" first appeared in online communities as derogatory slang, referring to humans who were unable to outsource all their thinking to a computer. Despite the quick spread of asking a computer to do it for you, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human complacency were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology.

Ape coding sounds harsher and more insulting, implying mindless or sloppy work rather than humor.

I really like to understand the practice of software engineering by analogy to research mathematics (like, no one ever asks mathematicians to estimate how long it will take to prove something…).

Something I think software engineers can take from math right now: years of everyone’s math education is spent doing things that computers have always been able to do trivially—arithmetic, solving simple equations, writing proofs that would just be `simp` in Lean—and no one wrings their hands over it. It’s an accepted part of the learning process.

Maybe the LLMs today are deeply flawed and cannot replace programmers. But, one day, LLMs (or some other AI approach) _will_ be successful in replacing programmers. It might not be this year or the year after.

I do however feel pretty confident in saying that there will be few programmers in 2076. This piece will look quite prescient.

It's just like how we say "can you imagine programming on a punchcard?"

Is it sci-fi like writing from the perspective of a future person?

It sounds like someone trying to make assumption sounds as fact. Not a fan.

In that picture, aping is probably a step up from stochastic parroting.

It should be flagged and taken down.

Seems like it's a doubly offensive term.

Are there better terms, less encumbered by bigotry, while still covering the "meat space" quality to this development approach?