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I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control b
by simonw 8mo ago
I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes.
Somehow civilization continues to function!
Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.
- ryanmcl 8mo ago[dead]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- PeterWhittaker 8mo agoThoroughly insightful take!
- simonw 8mo agoCongratulations. This is my favorite aspect of this whole thing: LLM tooling that's helping new people break into programming by lowering the friction and learning curve.
- falkensmaize 8mo agoBut the friction and learning curve is what helps you understand what you’re doing. The friction is an integral part of the process.
- simonw 8mo agoThe friction is why so many people never make it far up enough the learning curve to build something useful that solves their problems.
- falkensmaize 8mo agoYou could say the same thing about learning to fly a plane or play the piano. I’ve got no problem with people using llms to write useful utilities and programs for themselves, but it is leading us into a world where people are creating powerful things they don’t understand. That’s going to have consequences. We are already witnessing some of them.
- ryanmcl 8mo ago[dead]
- GuB-42 8mo agoThe thing is that programming is not an end goal, it is a means to a end. No one is paying you to "write code", they are paying you to make a website shat serves as a storefront, to make a video game, something for accounting,... It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an effective way of doing it, but there may be other options. For a storefront, there are website builders that let you do it very effectively if your needs match one of their templates, there are game engines that require no code, and a lot of accounting can be done in Excel. What I wanted to say is that maybe you could have done without code, but thanks to LLMs making code a viable option even for beginners, that's what you went for. In fact, vibe coding is barely even coding in the strictest sense of writing something in a programming language, since you are using natural language and code is just an intermediate step that you can see. The reason programmers use programming languages is not gatekeeping, unlike what many people who want to "eliminate programmers" think. It is that programming languages are very good at what they do, they are precise, unambiguous, concise and expressive. Alternatives like natural languages or graphical tools lack some of these attributes and therefore may not work as well. Like with many advanced tools, there is a learning curve, but once you reach a certain point, like when you intend to make it your job, it is worth it.
- intelVISA 8mo agoGood lord, thank you. I'm a huge fan of LLMs, they've replaced enormous amounts of toil for me but they are not 'my job'. If you walk to the kitchen and fry up an egg are you now a master chef? What's the difference between a surgeon and a butcher ...they both cut things? Most shops never really needed development expertise in-house as there's no shortage of many decent tools equally suitable as code for getting machines to do most business things. In some ways this is worse because while it's functionally the same black box intermediary as the alternative-to-code tools there's an illusion of control and more sunk cost. Do you want your sales team selling or learning JavaScript churning out goofy knock-offs for a well-solved problem?
- elzbardico 8mo agoNo. it was not. You could build a passable online shop after reading a django or ruby on rails book (250, 300 pages), and a couple tutorials to deploy it in some ease to use platform. Maybe it wouldn't be visually nice, but you would understand what you've built, which is something really really important if you are processing online payments.
- xorcist 8mo ago> That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming? Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learning on the job is exactly what people have done, always. Is it a good idea? Well, it is always better to have a professional at hand to help and do away with the beginner's problems from the beginning, but it's absolutely doable. Programming is not a black art, but something anyone with a bit of logical thinking can pick up from a book. Hence the "Learn yourself Java in 48 hours" books the were so popular for a while.
- ryanmcl 8mo ago[dead]
- tricorn 8mo agoI think your example highlights one of the places where even the current level of AI can be helpful and enabling, rather than a competitor for jobs, which is helping a person learn something new. Not always in all subjects (do NOT learn to fly a plane solely by AI, I say this as a flight instructor), and the person has to be careful to verify accuracy, but still it can be amazingly useful, and endlessly patient.
- guitarbill 8mo agoOne counter-example is the Horizon IT scandal. Obviously, you didn't say this directly, but "only a few people died/were affected, somehow civilization continues to function" maybe isn't the best argument.
- simonw 8mo agoSure, that scandal was horrific. I don't think the root cause was amateurs with bad spreadsheets. It was an institutional failure, and the software involved had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was built by supposed professionals.
- guitarbill 8mo agoSure, we can ignore that specific example, and that software has an effect on the world, and that people have been trained to expect software to be deterministic and accurate. Or if you want compare vibe coding with any technology, like electricity. Sure, that one person got electrocuted or their house burned down. But it's just so useful, and "somehow civilization continues to function". I guess they should've known better. I'm personally not comfortable hyping up the benefits whilst ignoring the risks, especially for lay people.
- krisoft 8mo ago> we can ignore that specific example We are not ignoring it. It is just not an example of a load bearing excel sheet.
- richm44 8mo agoTry this https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646 https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how...
- SteveNuts 8mo ago> Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to that organization. Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to suck up any data someone uploads.
- rsynnott 8mo agoIn which spreadsheet slop arguably sinks the economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Methodological_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho... (This paper was extremely influential in pushing austerity policies of questionable efficacy during the financial crisis.) We don't want _more_ of this.
- otabdeveloper4 8mo ago> Somehow civilization continues to function! Citation needed, I think.