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contravariant | on: AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
I'm still unsure if we won't figure out that the right abstraction level to describe what code means is, well, code.
Izmaki | parent | next
I've spend the past month-or-two on developing a platform scroller game for smartphones using nothing but AI. It has created everything given my instructions, to my liking, from the way the game is played to graphical assets to sound effects. It looks and feels like any other typical studio-developed game you could find in the store, the difference is that I didn't have a studio of professionals working fulltime for months or years with various levels of project management and what not. It's just me. Me and my agentic coding subscription.

Vibe coding originally meant giving an LLM an instruction, having it regurgitate something potentially wholesome, testing it and feeding back the errors for it to fix it. What I've done in the past couple of months is so, so much more than that. I'm a puppet master and my coding agent is my puppet. I don't need to understand the code when I can describe the problem I want solved and it will do it 100x faster than I ever could.

I didn't use code to describe this level of abstration. I used English prose - and a heck of a lot of software engineering theory, mind you. If you know the solution requires a quad-tree and binary search because in this case, that is the best option, then that's an instruction, not a block of code.

megaman821 | root | parent | next
Is it faster because you are using English prose or because you don't actually have to do a great job of specifying your game. If you say, make it look like X or have the controls like Y; you are just reusing the work of someone who has specified all that, probably in code. If you actually had to spell out every rule in English, you would find code is a much better language.
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contravariant | root | parent
If you don't particularly care how the code works or specifically what it does it seems pointless to worry about abstraction. Since, as you say, it solved the what you wanted solved and did so quickly.

But when you do care, it becomes important.

And, I suppose, computer code in general is terrible about writing things at the right level of abstraction, or at least human generated code is and I think LLMs do worse, somehow. So there is something to be said for prose as a specification language in most cases.

But I still think we're going to end up with some kind of code to reason about programs. Same way mathematicians have been using mathematical notation to reason about maths. But maybe it will be different code. Who knows, literary programming might catch on.

jimnotgym | parent
Is it a challenge to Agile methodologies? I mean is most software today designed at all? If we want a pm to be able to write half baked feature ideas and expect the devs to sort it out, rather than just paste the ticket into Claude, don't we make this chaos inevitable. Maybe there is a missing formal engineering layer missing between feature request and prompt. Llms seem to do much better when they are told exactly what to do, vs when they are given room to...express themselves