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by nemo1618 19 hours ago
Your assumption is mistaken (and a little rude).

I love programming. It's in my blood: my father and grandfather were programmers too. I have written everything from SIMD assembly to Hoon, and implemented several languages of my own. Believe me, I am intimately familiar with the phenomenon you are describing.

It's true, the devil is in the details. And I will grudgingly concede that, at present, humans are better at exorcising demons than AI. But I see no reason to believe that this will remain true. The gap is narrowing rapidly, and even today there are types of demons that AI can dispatch much more quickly and effectively than you or I can. The fact that vibe coding is possible at all (and that people are willing to pay for vibe-coded apps) is proof that an informal English prompt is sufficient to specify software to an acceptable degree. Not acceptable to everyone, naturally, but at least to the creator and the users.

I am not exactly happy about this. It is bittersweet. Much of my identity is bound up in being a programmer. The devil is in the details; but joy and whimsy and great beauty are in the details as well. For a glorious few decades, one could be an artist under the guise of producing economic value. Now, the economic aspect of producing software is being siphoned off, to be done by machines, leaving only the art. I think we will suffer for that, somewhat. But it is a small price to pay.

1 comments

I did not mean to offend, and only made the assumption for the stated reason. Apologies!