My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.
We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.
You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg A quarter-century ago, we were developing a new version of JProbe, and as we got close to the day we had to send the golden master to the factory to manufacture CDs, we were short a settings configuration tool.
The team were told to skip the GUI editor and work on mission-critical features. Meanwhile, the program manager spent a weekend writing the editor in HyperCard, packaged with Metacard, a tool now known as LiveCode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)
We shipped it.
@jonathanhogg Afterward:
The program manager eventually left the company, and the team immediately rewrote the editor in Java/Swing. It took a summer, but now the company could brag that it used Java exclusively to write tools for Java.
I certainly never met a customer who cared whether the editor was written in Java. For that matter, nobody cared that the core analysis engine was written in C++.
Programming is a pop culture.
