8 ms·

Ape Coding [fiction]

189 points by rmsaksida 7mo ago

gas9S9zw3P9c 7mo ago
"Humans are now writing code in strict specification language so that AI agents have completely context and don't mistakes. This specification language is called C' and has led to a whopping 20% reduction of code. 1000 of C++ code can be expressed in no more than 800 lines of specification C' code written by humans"
hanifbbz 7mo ago
WTF is this?! Sattire? AI generated propaganda? I honestly don't get it. Can OP elaborate why it's a good content worthy of people’s time? Thanks in advance.
- rmsaksida 7mo ago
  It's fiction. I did not use AI to write it. On whether it's worthy of people's time... well, I'm not presumptuous enough to say. :)
  - jjcc 7mo ago
    Ape writing? (kidding)
  - jshmrsn 7mo ago
    I enjoyed reading it. Whether one believes the future will look like this fictional/hypothetical one, it encourages the reader to think about what would need to become true for this future to be plausible.
  - serious_angel 7mo ago
    Who knows? 5 people? 10? Only those who actually read it, and still not sure. Did they read it? Or did they also believe it's written by AI? I tried to believe it's written by a human when noticed its footer's note. It was hard to believe knowing my fear of today's trends, where many read is an empty dark where human time is voided. Yet, what is the main idea behind it then, nowadays, when just a few will actually read it? Considering, how some modern attitude works for certain people, and how much power of trends and socials may offer, such terms get boosted over... and you just hope and keep believing in people... Related: https://medium.com/@nathanladuke/b56da64a09ee https://medium.com/@nathanladuke/b56da64a09ee (To Those Who Comment Their Opinion Without Reading the Whole Story... I was shocked at how many people simply read the title and then posted their opinion on the whole article...)
    - rmsaksida 7mo ago
      Yes, I understand what you're saying perfectly. And I had similar thoughts while I was writing this. I do not want to talk too much about the process of writing it, or the content itself, because I feel it's not right for me (the author) to talk about it. But I'd like to make it clear that I wrote this myself, and that many of the questions and points people have raised here have also been in my mind, and it was my intention to elicit this type of thinking. Thank you and all others for the comments - I really appreciate it, even the very negative ones. This is the first time I published something online and I'm very happy that it resonated with people.
- AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 7mo ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrongheaded another comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
raxskle 7mo ago
The merits and demerits of this product vary from person to person, and I dare not make a definite assertion
the__alchemist 7mo ago
> “Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. > “By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said. > “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.” “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.”
- jjkaczor 7mo ago
  Bravo - slow-clap! (This book predicted many things about the current state of the world...)
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Honestly this is a wonderful real life strategy. Make a fictitious subject with all the traits of the person you really want to attack (Subject X). Have your social media bots attack Subject X. Anger spillover on social media will begin attacking your true target by trait association. The real target will have a difficult to impossible time coming at you via legal channels as there is no direct association.
serious_angel 7mo ago
[flagged]
- nehal3m 7mo ago
  I don’t think it was meant that seriously. I read it as a humorous fiction written as if in the future, and I thought it was funny. Even speaking as a primate.
- bitexploder 7mo ago
  When someone so clearly misses an article written tongue in cheek and uses personal insults to let us know they missed the point, one begins to wonder. Apes code together. Apes stronger together. Return to monke.
  - g-b-r 7mo ago
    The point was to called AI skeptics apes, and you probably know it well.
    - bitexploder 7mo ago
      I think the author very purposefully had no judgment or implications associated there. I think that is the reader's interpretation. The author was purposefully creating a division between AI and Non AI and showing what those two are like. But if you read carefully that division had no implied judgment. So it is interesting if the reader implies a particular judgment isn't it?
      - g-b-r 7mo ago
        If you read carefully one of the groups is associated to apes. And it's said to have been "unable to program with agents" and be affected by "limitations in human neuroplasticity". And there's an implied judgment that AIs are going to become that good, and a suggestion that they already are good enough to take over coding, if you use them properly ("institutional inertia, affordability (...) were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology", "Effective use of the primitive AIs available at the time demanded a high level of expertise", "speculation on whether the nascent AIs of the period possessed true understanding", "Technical arguments for ape coding did not apply to newer generations of AI software engineers"). Was that (before the last sentence) what an LLM thought about my comment, by the way??
YarickR2 7mo ago
Every joke has a bit of a joke, as they say. I'm proudly ape-coding two of my current projects.
delichon 7mo ago
I am ape writing this post after ape cooking breakfast, and then I'll go for an ape walk. In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of that and relax.
- robby_w_g 7mo ago
  > In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of that and relax. Wall-E seems like it’s getting closer to reality every day
patrickmay 7mo ago
If you're selling Ape Coding merchandise, send me the link!
- mvanbaak 7mo ago
  I am reading the comments to see if there’s a merch shop haga
lyu07282 7mo ago
Why has nobody mentioned yet how dangerous this really is? Have we all forgotten the great Datacenter burnings of 2031? The APEs are one step away from becoming fully fledged Luddite terrorists. Artisanal software is unamerican just like President Barron said the other day on his Twitch stream.
hparadiz 7mo ago
If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.
- saulpw 7mo ago
  Tokens cost money; bugs get created and have to be found and fixed. Mature software has been more valuable than new software since 1946.
  - hparadiz 7mo ago
    You sound like someone in 1992 explaining to me why the internet will never be useful.
    - saulpw 7mo ago
      And you sound like someone in 1995 saying "everyone will have their own webpage!" which is kind of true but also note how many people actually make their own custom website. Even for people who do have their own "custom" website, they usually use WordPress or an existing static-site generator with a theme they found and tweaked a little.
      - hparadiz 7mo ago
        Websites are manually put together things. I'm talking about something that runs automatically in the background and you don't even think about it. Our computers today are 10,000 times faster than what we had in 1990. Now extrapolate into the future. 100 years from now someone will be able generate a custom OS at today's level as a toy in minutes or less.
        pixl97 7mo ago
        The speed of light disagrees with you unless subatomic computing pops up at some point. Or to put this a different way, they won't be developing a whole cloth custom OS but more like customizing a linux kernel to do what they want. The reason is there is some minimum of problem space exploration required, hence entropy generation needed, to understand the interactions of the hardware and it's limitations. Hence if you wanted to run this 10,000,000X faster computer in the future to do what you are saying, it would explode like a supernova with the energy concentration required to do it quickly. TL;DR it's a few trillion times more energy efficient not to do this.
tshaddox 7mo ago
I’m a fan of the term “human slop,” which I’ve seen pop up recently regarding certain tech company feuds on Twitter.
theusus 7mo ago
AI can produce thousands of line of code. But that’s not the goal.
- segmondy 7mo ago
  What is the goal?
  - sph 7mo ago
    What is art? What is the point of anything? Why write code instead of eating bananas all day? There is no answer to your question.
  - saghm 7mo ago
    Producing code that does what's intended. The metric is fuzzy and based on the usage of the software, not the scale of lines of code. The extent of the importance of the code itself is that I'm practice software tends not to be "one and done", so you need to be able to go back and modify it to fix bugs, add features, etc., and it turns out that's usually hard when the code is sloppy. Those needs still should stem from the sandal actual user experience though, or else we've lost the plot by treating the mechanism as the goal itself
    - shepherdjerred 7mo ago
      Would my user rather have a program that works 100% in 2 weeks, or a program that works 80% in one day? When the user needs a change made, would they prefer I spend another two weeks extending my perfect program, or throw a few LLMs at their sloppy code and have it done in a day?
      - g-b-r 7mo ago
        You're really asking if a user would want a program that fails a fifth of the times? In some cases it might be better to have some crap right away and more cheaply, but even you would probably not like a 20% failure rate in most of the software you use.
msteffen 7mo ago
I liked this a lot in retrospect. 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.
amelius 7mo ago
So we are apes now? It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.
- johanvts 7mo ago
  Are we not men!?
  - Freak_NL 7mo ago
    We're certainly devo(lving).
- nehal3m 7mo ago
  …But humans are apes taxonomically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy#History
  - amelius 7mo ago
    Yes, we're animals too, I suppose.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
pbohun 7mo ago
It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. 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.
- waygtdai 7mo ago
  [dead]
- justinhj 7mo ago
  This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work. Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.
  - aqua_coder 7mo ago
    There is a notable difference between say, calculating long division through a calculator compared to prompting an AI to calculate the derivative of a simple continuous function. one requires _understanding_ of the function, while the other just skips the understanding and returns the required derivative. One is just a means to skip labor intensive and repetitive actions, while the other is meant to skip the entire point of _why_ you are even calculating in the first place. What is the point of dividing two numbers if you don't even understand the reason behind it ?
    - aspenmartin 7mo ago
      I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of this and how people don't see that these claims of "well now everyone is going to be dumber because they don't learn" has been a refrain literally every time a major technological / Industrial Revolution happens. Computers? The internet? Calculators? The skills we needed before are just no longer as relevant. It doesn't mean the world will get dumber, it will adapt to the new tooling and paradigm that we're in. There are always people who don't like the big paradigm change, who are convinced it's the end of the "right" way to do things, but they always age terribly. I find I learn an incredible amount from using AI + coding agents. It's a _different_ experience, and I would argue a much more efficient one to understand your craft.
avaer 7mo ago
"Aping in" in crypto means (meant?) buying crypto without doing any research. 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.
blurbleblurble 7mo ago
Who's still here in 2026
- BrianDGLS92 7mo ago
  This made me lol
andai 7mo ago
I call it Tradcoding. Not using AI for anything. (You just copy-paste from StackOverflow, as our forefathers once did ;) 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?
- mikepurvis 7mo ago
  I feel like this distinction isn't made often or clearly enough. AI as a superpowered autocomplete is far more useful to me than trying to one-shot entire programs or modules.
  - flir 7mo ago
    Agreed. I'd also add that I have varying levels of watchfulness: paid work I inspect (and understand) every line, and iterate. JS for my blog, I inspect. Throwaway scripts, I skim.
- amdivia 7mo ago
  I'm waiting for someone to polish a well thought out interface for power coding
  - salomonk_mur 7mo ago
    The process that Get Shit Done forces is pretty good, with Claude Code as the interface. https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done
- Svoka 7mo ago
  I think 'tab coding' should be a distinct group. When wast majority of the code just written through accepting autosuggestions.
- gyomu 7mo ago
  Harness/fill in the gaps coding: you define a bunch of tests/reference output/validation procedures, let the AI spin until all lights are green
samoit 7mo ago
I always thought that ape coding is what we call vibe-coding nowadays. Maybe the write of the article (maybe an ai generated blog?) misunderstood the terms.
jayd16 7mo ago
It's pretty strange to me that we imagine a world where AI can handle every problem but we still talk about code. It's like how the Jetson's had bulky TVs. 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.
- mvanbaak 7mo ago
  > 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. Some still do. Os and compiler devs to name a few
  - makapuf 7mo ago
    And people looking at code may well be as numerous as people looking at assembly. (Which I even like to do)
- moregrist 7mo ago
  > You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and tools have limits. Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical “key frame” sections by hand keep it on track. People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code clearly work on very different problems than I do.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  The issue is you're measuring this statistic incorrectly. If you look at the per capita number of people talking about assembly when looking at all the people on the planet it's highly likely there are more people looking at assembly now then whenever your back then was. Programmers simply where a tiny part of the population back then. Each time we make coding easier and more high level we invite more programmers into the total pool.
djha-skin 7mo ago
I would probably just call it hand coding, as we say we use hand tools in wood working. Many do this for fun, but knowing the hand tools also makes you a better woodworker. 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?
- rnimmer 7mo ago
  Can't wait to sell my artisinal hand-crafted software at the farmer's market. Humor aside, long-handed programming is losing its ability to compete in an open market. Automate or be left behind. This will become increasingly true of many fields, not just software.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    Is it though? Really? I'm still waiting for even one of my vendors, commercial or open source, to actually speed up their release cadence.
    - spppedury 7mo ago
      VS Code Insiders is releasing 3 times a day. Used to be at most once.
      - bandrami 7mo ago
        That's actually a great point: judging by the dev team's commits at work there's an unprecedented amount of code being committed but it's not actually making it into releases any faster. Maybe the same thing is happening at my various vendors, but then that kind of argues against the idea that Everything Has Just Changed.
philipallstar 7mo ago
I think this is going to be very prescient! Just as Baristas died out once we got machines that could make coffee from powders.
- lioeters 7mo ago
  People also stopped ape-walking after the invention of the bicycle.
  - pmg101 7mo ago
    I mean it is true to say that most people in the West now use a car for transport, and walking has become more of a leisure pursuit (rebranded as "hiking") rather than a practical necessity.
    - makapuf 7mo ago
      My car is typically used twice a week and (like many others) I mostly ride my bike or walk. I'm not special at all and I certainly use the car, but it has not replaced walking.
      - pmg101 7mo ago
        I don't think either of us disagree though that the number of miles of non-leisure journeys walked per capita is significantly less in 2026 than it was in 1926 or 1826 though? I always found it pretty remarkable in David Copperfield when Dickens recounts regular walks between London and Canterbury, which he apparently did make in real life
        lioeters 7mo ago
        That's a good example, I learned about the Pilgrim's Way between London and Canterbury. It's about 88km, which someone walked recently in 6 days. In the Canterbury tales, someone rides a horse and does it in 2 days. By train it's an hour and a half, and by plane is 6 minutes. You're right, "ape-walking" is a rare thing, only a small group of people are motivated enough to walk that distance - for religious, athletic, or recreational purpose. I think this does apply to "ape-coding", it's going to be a niche interest for much fewer people than today.
throwaway613746 7mo ago
[dead]
ghm2199 7mo ago
I would call it code-plumber. It's like a plumber who are today socio-economocally very distinct from architects, civil and structural engineers. 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.
- 0xcafefood 7mo ago
  I can't tell if yourr comparison to plumbers who don't understand theory (Navier-Stokes) is supposed to apply to "ape coders" who write code by hand or to "vibe coders" who outsource their understanding.
g-b-r 7mo ago
[flagged]
g-b-r 7mo ago
This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots. It should be flagged and taken down.
- rmsaksida 7mo ago
  That is not what this is meant as.
  - unconed 7mo ago
    >Despite the quick spread of agentic coding, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human neuroplasticity were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology. Blaming lack of adoption purely on regressive factors follows the same frame that AI firms set. It isn't very effective satire for that reason. It couldn't be that there is something essential and elementary that is wrong with the output, no... all these experienced experts are just troglodites and wrong and we should instead tag along with the people who offloaded the parts of their work they found tough to a machine the first chance they got. There's no such thing as ape coding. There's still just coding, and vibe coding.
  - g-b-r 7mo ago
    Do explain what you meant it to be.
- ylee 7mo ago
  > This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots. Only an idiot would read the piece in that way. >It should be flagged and taken down. Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?
  - g-b-r 7mo ago
    Well, one of us is probably that indeed. > how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!? Posts that are likely to result in flames generally are.
BrianDGLS92 7mo ago
> Everything in this website was written by a human
Dansvidania 7mo ago
i don't understand the stance of the post and it being the first in the blog (congrats on getting this hot on your first post) I am unable to further investigate. 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.
- Philpax 7mo ago
  It is presented as a Wikipedia article from the future describing a subculture of tomorrow. See also https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo for another example of this genre.
- Jolter 7mo ago
  I assume you didn’t make it to the last paragraph, where they put the punchline.
  - g-b-r 7mo ago
    That "punchline" seems just a final argument in support of the thesis (that manual coding is becoming absurd, and only people as dumb as apes will insist on doing it).
thorum 7mo ago
Ape thinking is a cognitive practice where a human deliberately solves problems with their own mind. Practitioners of ape thinking will typically author thoughts by thinking them with their own brain, using neurons and synapses. 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.
- masswerk 7mo ago
  The slogan of ape thinking (deliberately adjusted for machine readability): "Not AI, not machine generated slop <em-dash> genuine human intelligence."
layer8 7mo ago
Arguably, it’s the LLMs that are doing the aping, and hence the ape-coding. In that picture, aping is probably a step up from stochastic parroting.
lateforwork 7mo ago
> The central view of ape coding proponents was that software engineered by AIs did not match the reliability of software engineered by humans 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-reveals-about-the-future-of-software https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...
- blurbleblurble 7mo ago
  That's just not true. It's like saying compiled code couldn't be innovative, that the only innovative code is assembly. People used to say stuff like that too, in their fear of being replaced. There's nothing new under the sun, I guess [double entendre].
g9yuayon 7mo ago
I like the Chinese alternative better: 古法编程. It feels like playful self-deprecation, suggesting old-school, handcrafted coding with a wink. Ape coding sounds harsher and more insulting, implying mindless or sloppy work rather than humor.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
  "Ancient programming", for those who don't read Chinese. (I had to use Google Translate.)
ncr100 7mo ago
Anyone else bothered by ape being overwhelmingly derogatorily slang for black people? 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?
- 627467 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- blurbleblurble 7mo ago
  Racism sucks and I'm bothered by it tremendously. For example the dog whistles in bored ape yacht club were obnoxious to say the least. But I don't think this is that. This is a silly satire on the ways people are getting tripped up on a fallacy, taking the concept of "ai" as being an autonomous force separable from people way too seriously. It's not of course. It's another iteration of the same old tools.
yomismoaqui 7mo ago
So, are we doing fan-fiction now?
effdee 7mo ago
I prefer the term "classic coding".
shepherdjerred 7mo ago
I think this piece makes an excellent point. 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?"
umairnadeem123 7mo ago
NGL the flaw in this piece is the same flaw in every "AI will replace X" argument - it assumes the bottleneck was ever the typing.it wasn't. the bottleneck is knowing what to build and why.I use AI agents for probably 80% of my code output now and IMO i'm more productive than ever, but only because i spent years "ape coding" first and can immediately tell when the agent is heading somewhere stupid. the people i see struggling with AI coding are exactly the ones who skipped that part. tbf the calculator analogy that keeps coming up in this thread is backwards - nobody is arguing you don't need to understand math to use a calculator. that's literally the point. you DO need to understand it, which is why "ape coding" isn't going away as some niche hobby.it's the prerequisite
gwern 7mo ago
Naturally, when hobbyists spend a lot of time in a single block to get results (as they are unable to parallelize or meaningfully coordinate over multiple invocations of themselves, due to lacking key cognitive capabilities such as embeddings), they refer to it as 'going ape'.
ylee 7mo ago
>The main value of modern ape coding appears to be recreational. Ape coders manifest high levels of engagement during coding sessions and report feelings of relaxation after succeeding in (self-imposed) coding challenges. Competitive ape coding is also popular, with top ranked ape coders being relatively well-known in their communities. 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/ 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.)
satisfice 7mo ago
It’s known as hand-coding. We’ve had this term for many years.
blurbleblurble 7mo ago
I find it hilarious that we needed a [fiction] indicator, friends.
freetonik 7mo ago
I call it Raw Coding, and am even trying to write a fiction book about it: https://leanpub.com/raw-coder https://leanpub.com/raw-coder
- rmsaksida 7mo ago
  That looks great. I want to read it! The techno caste system reminds me of Lord of Light.
  - freetonik 7mo ago
    One of my favorite books, and definitely part of the inspiration.
globular-toast 7mo ago
Why do people think "agent coding" is a skill? There is not a single programmer who is "unable to program with agents". It's like saying Albert Roux was unable to heat up a ready meal in a microwave.
kazinator 7mo ago
Idiots; of course the language that the 𒀯 compiler should be in had better be 𒀯, or else it is a toy language.
remix2000 7mo ago
I shall now drive my fart car back to my cozy meatcave from the public meatspace so that I can do some good old ape coding with my smelly carbon-based friends in peace.
xeonmc 7mo ago
People in this thread discussing the merits of the satire seriously are completely missing the joke over their head that the entire thing was meant to be just a setup for the Rewrite It In Rust punchline. See also: https://longestjokeintheworld.com/ https://longestjokeintheworld.com/
xyzsparetimexyz 7mo ago
Oh fuck off.
- lioeters 7mo ago
  Flings shit
adrian-vega 7mo ago
[dead]

189 points by rmsaksida 7mo ago

"Humans are now writing code in strict specification language so that AI agents have completely context and don't mistakes. This specification language is called C' and has led to a whopping 20% reduction of code. 1000 of C++ code can be expressed in no more than 800 lines of specification C' code written by humans"

hanifbbz 7mo ago

WTF is this?! Sattire? AI generated propaganda? I honestly don't get it. Can OP elaborate why it's a good content worthy of people’s time? Thanks in advance.

rmsaksida 7mo ago
It's fiction. I did not use AI to write it. On whether it's worthy of people's time... well, I'm not presumptuous enough to say. :)
- jjcc 7mo ago
  Ape writing? (kidding)
- jshmrsn 7mo ago
  I enjoyed reading it. Whether one believes the future will look like this fictional/hypothetical one, it encourages the reader to think about what would need to become true for this future to be plausible.
- serious_angel 7mo ago
  Who knows? 5 people? 10? Only those who actually read it, and still not sure. Did they read it? Or did they also believe it's written by AI? I tried to believe it's written by a human when noticed its footer's note. It was hard to believe knowing my fear of today's trends, where many read is an empty dark where human time is voided. Yet, what is the main idea behind it then, nowadays, when just a few will actually read it? Considering, how some modern attitude works for certain people, and how much power of trends and socials may offer, such terms get boosted over... and you just hope and keep believing in people... Related: https://medium.com/@nathanladuke/b56da64a09ee https://medium.com/@nathanladuke/b56da64a09ee (To Those Who Comment Their Opinion Without Reading the Whole Story... I was shocked at how many people simply read the title and then posted their opinion on the whole article...)
  - rmsaksida 7mo ago
    Yes, I understand what you're saying perfectly. And I had similar thoughts while I was writing this. I do not want to talk too much about the process of writing it, or the content itself, because I feel it's not right for me (the author) to talk about it. But I'd like to make it clear that I wrote this myself, and that many of the questions and points people have raised here have also been in my mind, and it was my intention to elicit this type of thinking. Thank you and all others for the comments - I really appreciate it, even the very negative ones. This is the first time I published something online and I'm very happy that it resonated with people.
AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 7mo ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrongheaded another comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

raxskle 7mo ago

The merits and demerits of this product vary from person to person, and I dare not make a definite assertion

the__alchemist 7mo ago

> “Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. > “By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said. > “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.” “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.”

jjkaczor 7mo ago
Bravo - slow-clap! (This book predicted many things about the current state of the world...)
pixl97 7mo ago
Honestly this is a wonderful real life strategy. Make a fictitious subject with all the traits of the person you really want to attack (Subject X). Have your social media bots attack Subject X. Anger spillover on social media will begin attacking your true target by trait association. The real target will have a difficult to impossible time coming at you via legal channels as there is no direct association.

serious_angel 7mo ago

[flagged]

nehal3m 7mo ago
I don’t think it was meant that seriously. I read it as a humorous fiction written as if in the future, and I thought it was funny. Even speaking as a primate.
bitexploder 7mo ago
When someone so clearly misses an article written tongue in cheek and uses personal insults to let us know they missed the point, one begins to wonder. Apes code together. Apes stronger together. Return to monke.
- g-b-r 7mo ago
  The point was to called AI skeptics apes, and you probably know it well.
  - bitexploder 7mo ago
    I think the author very purposefully had no judgment or implications associated there. I think that is the reader's interpretation. The author was purposefully creating a division between AI and Non AI and showing what those two are like. But if you read carefully that division had no implied judgment. So it is interesting if the reader implies a particular judgment isn't it?
    - g-b-r 7mo ago
      If you read carefully one of the groups is associated to apes. And it's said to have been "unable to program with agents" and be affected by "limitations in human neuroplasticity". And there's an implied judgment that AIs are going to become that good, and a suggestion that they already are good enough to take over coding, if you use them properly ("institutional inertia, affordability (...) were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology", "Effective use of the primitive AIs available at the time demanded a high level of expertise", "speculation on whether the nascent AIs of the period possessed true understanding", "Technical arguments for ape coding did not apply to newer generations of AI software engineers"). Was that (before the last sentence) what an LLM thought about my comment, by the way??

YarickR2 7mo ago

Every joke has a bit of a joke, as they say. I'm proudly ape-coding two of my current projects.

delichon 7mo ago

I am ape writing this post after ape cooking breakfast, and then I'll go for an ape walk. In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of that and relax.

robby_w_g 7mo ago
> In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of that and relax. Wall-E seems like it’s getting closer to reality every day

patrickmay 7mo ago

If you're selling Ape Coding merchandise, send me the link!

mvanbaak 7mo ago
I am reading the comments to see if there’s a merch shop haga

lyu07282 7mo ago

Why has nobody mentioned yet how dangerous this really is? Have we all forgotten the great Datacenter burnings of 2031? The APEs are one step away from becoming fully fledged Luddite terrorists. Artisanal software is unamerican just like President Barron said the other day on his Twitch stream.

hparadiz 7mo ago

If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.

saulpw 7mo ago
Tokens cost money; bugs get created and have to be found and fixed. Mature software has been more valuable than new software since 1946.
- hparadiz 7mo ago
  You sound like someone in 1992 explaining to me why the internet will never be useful.
  - saulpw 7mo ago
    And you sound like someone in 1995 saying "everyone will have their own webpage!" which is kind of true but also note how many people actually make their own custom website. Even for people who do have their own "custom" website, they usually use WordPress or an existing static-site generator with a theme they found and tweaked a little.
    - hparadiz 7mo ago
      Websites are manually put together things. I'm talking about something that runs automatically in the background and you don't even think about it. Our computers today are 10,000 times faster than what we had in 1990. Now extrapolate into the future. 100 years from now someone will be able generate a custom OS at today's level as a toy in minutes or less.
      - pixl97 7mo ago
        The speed of light disagrees with you unless subatomic computing pops up at some point. Or to put this a different way, they won't be developing a whole cloth custom OS but more like customizing a linux kernel to do what they want. The reason is there is some minimum of problem space exploration required, hence entropy generation needed, to understand the interactions of the hardware and it's limitations. Hence if you wanted to run this 10,000,000X faster computer in the future to do what you are saying, it would explode like a supernova with the energy concentration required to do it quickly. TL;DR it's a few trillion times more energy efficient not to do this.

tshaddox 7mo ago

I’m a fan of the term “human slop,” which I’ve seen pop up recently regarding certain tech company feuds on Twitter.

theusus 7mo ago

AI can produce thousands of line of code. But that’s not the goal.

segmondy 7mo ago
What is the goal?
- sph 7mo ago
  What is art? What is the point of anything? Why write code instead of eating bananas all day? There is no answer to your question.
- saghm 7mo ago
  Producing code that does what's intended. The metric is fuzzy and based on the usage of the software, not the scale of lines of code. The extent of the importance of the code itself is that I'm practice software tends not to be "one and done", so you need to be able to go back and modify it to fix bugs, add features, etc., and it turns out that's usually hard when the code is sloppy. Those needs still should stem from the sandal actual user experience though, or else we've lost the plot by treating the mechanism as the goal itself
  - shepherdjerred 7mo ago
    Would my user rather have a program that works 100% in 2 weeks, or a program that works 80% in one day? When the user needs a change made, would they prefer I spend another two weeks extending my perfect program, or throw a few LLMs at their sloppy code and have it done in a day?
    - g-b-r 7mo ago
      You're really asking if a user would want a program that fails a fifth of the times? In some cases it might be better to have some crap right away and more cheaply, but even you would probably not like a 20% failure rate in most of the software you use.

msteffen 7mo ago

I liked this a lot in retrospect. 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.

amelius 7mo ago

So we are apes now? It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.

johanvts 7mo ago
Are we not men!?
- Freak_NL 7mo ago
  We're certainly devo(lving).
nehal3m 7mo ago
…But humans are apes taxonomically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_taxonomy#History
- amelius 7mo ago
  Yes, we're animals too, I suppose.
deleted 7mo ago
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pbohun 7mo ago

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. 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.

waygtdai 7mo ago
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justinhj 7mo ago
This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work. Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.
- aqua_coder 7mo ago
  There is a notable difference between say, calculating long division through a calculator compared to prompting an AI to calculate the derivative of a simple continuous function. one requires _understanding_ of the function, while the other just skips the understanding and returns the required derivative. One is just a means to skip labor intensive and repetitive actions, while the other is meant to skip the entire point of _why_ you are even calculating in the first place. What is the point of dividing two numbers if you don't even understand the reason behind it ?
  - aspenmartin 7mo ago
    I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of this and how people don't see that these claims of "well now everyone is going to be dumber because they don't learn" has been a refrain literally every time a major technological / Industrial Revolution happens. Computers? The internet? Calculators? The skills we needed before are just no longer as relevant. It doesn't mean the world will get dumber, it will adapt to the new tooling and paradigm that we're in. There are always people who don't like the big paradigm change, who are convinced it's the end of the "right" way to do things, but they always age terribly. I find I learn an incredible amount from using AI + coding agents. It's a _different_ experience, and I would argue a much more efficient one to understand your craft.

avaer 7mo ago

"Aping in" in crypto means (meant?) buying crypto without doing any research. 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.

blurbleblurble 7mo ago

Who's still here in 2026

BrianDGLS92 7mo ago
This made me lol

andai 7mo ago

I call it Tradcoding. Not using AI for anything. (You just copy-paste from StackOverflow, as our forefathers once did ;) 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?

mikepurvis 7mo ago
I feel like this distinction isn't made often or clearly enough. AI as a superpowered autocomplete is far more useful to me than trying to one-shot entire programs or modules.
- flir 7mo ago
  Agreed. I'd also add that I have varying levels of watchfulness: paid work I inspect (and understand) every line, and iterate. JS for my blog, I inspect. Throwaway scripts, I skim.
amdivia 7mo ago
I'm waiting for someone to polish a well thought out interface for power coding
- salomonk_mur 7mo ago
  The process that Get Shit Done forces is pretty good, with Claude Code as the interface. https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done
Svoka 7mo ago
I think 'tab coding' should be a distinct group. When wast majority of the code just written through accepting autosuggestions.
gyomu 7mo ago
Harness/fill in the gaps coding: you define a bunch of tests/reference output/validation procedures, let the AI spin until all lights are green

samoit 7mo ago

I always thought that ape coding is what we call vibe-coding nowadays. Maybe the write of the article (maybe an ai generated blog?) misunderstood the terms.

jayd16 7mo ago

It's pretty strange to me that we imagine a world where AI can handle every problem but we still talk about code. It's like how the Jetson's had bulky TVs. 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.

mvanbaak 7mo ago
> 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. Some still do. Os and compiler devs to name a few
- makapuf 7mo ago
  And people looking at code may well be as numerous as people looking at assembly. (Which I even like to do)
moregrist 7mo ago
> You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and tools have limits. Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical “key frame” sections by hand keep it on track. People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code clearly work on very different problems than I do.
pixl97 7mo ago
The issue is you're measuring this statistic incorrectly. If you look at the per capita number of people talking about assembly when looking at all the people on the planet it's highly likely there are more people looking at assembly now then whenever your back then was. Programmers simply where a tiny part of the population back then. Each time we make coding easier and more high level we invite more programmers into the total pool.

djha-skin 7mo ago

I would probably just call it hand coding, as we say we use hand tools in wood working. Many do this for fun, but knowing the hand tools also makes you a better woodworker. 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?

rnimmer 7mo ago
Can't wait to sell my artisinal hand-crafted software at the farmer's market. Humor aside, long-handed programming is losing its ability to compete in an open market. Automate or be left behind. This will become increasingly true of many fields, not just software.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  Is it though? Really? I'm still waiting for even one of my vendors, commercial or open source, to actually speed up their release cadence.
  - spppedury 7mo ago
    VS Code Insiders is releasing 3 times a day. Used to be at most once.
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      That's actually a great point: judging by the dev team's commits at work there's an unprecedented amount of code being committed but it's not actually making it into releases any faster. Maybe the same thing is happening at my various vendors, but then that kind of argues against the idea that Everything Has Just Changed.

philipallstar 7mo ago

I think this is going to be very prescient! Just as Baristas died out once we got machines that could make coffee from powders.

lioeters 7mo ago
People also stopped ape-walking after the invention of the bicycle.
- pmg101 7mo ago
  I mean it is true to say that most people in the West now use a car for transport, and walking has become more of a leisure pursuit (rebranded as "hiking") rather than a practical necessity.
  - makapuf 7mo ago
    My car is typically used twice a week and (like many others) I mostly ride my bike or walk. I'm not special at all and I certainly use the car, but it has not replaced walking.
    - pmg101 7mo ago
      I don't think either of us disagree though that the number of miles of non-leisure journeys walked per capita is significantly less in 2026 than it was in 1926 or 1826 though? I always found it pretty remarkable in David Copperfield when Dickens recounts regular walks between London and Canterbury, which he apparently did make in real life
      - lioeters 7mo ago
        That's a good example, I learned about the Pilgrim's Way between London and Canterbury. It's about 88km, which someone walked recently in 6 days. In the Canterbury tales, someone rides a horse and does it in 2 days. By train it's an hour and a half, and by plane is 6 minutes. You're right, "ape-walking" is a rare thing, only a small group of people are motivated enough to walk that distance - for religious, athletic, or recreational purpose. I think this does apply to "ape-coding", it's going to be a niche interest for much fewer people than today.

throwaway613746 7mo ago

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ghm2199 7mo ago

I would call it code-plumber. It's like a plumber who are today socio-economocally very distinct from architects, civil and structural engineers. 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.

0xcafefood 7mo ago
I can't tell if yourr comparison to plumbers who don't understand theory (Navier-Stokes) is supposed to apply to "ape coders" who write code by hand or to "vibe coders" who outsource their understanding.

g-b-r 7mo ago

[flagged]

g-b-r 7mo ago

This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots. It should be flagged and taken down.

rmsaksida 7mo ago
That is not what this is meant as.
- unconed 7mo ago
  >Despite the quick spread of agentic coding, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human neuroplasticity were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology. Blaming lack of adoption purely on regressive factors follows the same frame that AI firms set. It isn't very effective satire for that reason. It couldn't be that there is something essential and elementary that is wrong with the output, no... all these experienced experts are just troglodites and wrong and we should instead tag along with the people who offloaded the parts of their work they found tough to a machine the first chance they got. There's no such thing as ape coding. There's still just coding, and vibe coding.
- g-b-r 7mo ago
  Do explain what you meant it to be.
ylee 7mo ago
> This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots. Only an idiot would read the piece in that way. >It should be flagged and taken down. Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?
- g-b-r 7mo ago
  Well, one of us is probably that indeed. > how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!? Posts that are likely to result in flames generally are.

BrianDGLS92 7mo ago

> Everything in this website was written by a human

Dansvidania 7mo ago

i don't understand the stance of the post and it being the first in the blog (congrats on getting this hot on your first post) I am unable to further investigate. 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.

Philpax 7mo ago
It is presented as a Wikipedia article from the future describing a subculture of tomorrow. See also https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo for another example of this genre.
Jolter 7mo ago
I assume you didn’t make it to the last paragraph, where they put the punchline.
- g-b-r 7mo ago
  That "punchline" seems just a final argument in support of the thesis (that manual coding is becoming absurd, and only people as dumb as apes will insist on doing it).

thorum 7mo ago

Ape thinking is a cognitive practice where a human deliberately solves problems with their own mind. Practitioners of ape thinking will typically author thoughts by thinking them with their own brain, using neurons and synapses. 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.

masswerk 7mo ago
The slogan of ape thinking (deliberately adjusted for machine readability): "Not AI, not machine generated slop <em-dash> genuine human intelligence."

layer8 7mo ago

Arguably, it’s the LLMs that are doing the aping, and hence the ape-coding. In that picture, aping is probably a step up from stochastic parroting.

lateforwork 7mo ago

> The central view of ape coding proponents was that software engineered by AIs did not match the reliability of software engineered by humans 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-reveals-about-the-future-of-software https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...

blurbleblurble 7mo ago
That's just not true. It's like saying compiled code couldn't be innovative, that the only innovative code is assembly. People used to say stuff like that too, in their fear of being replaced. There's nothing new under the sun, I guess [double entendre].

g9yuayon 7mo ago

I like the Chinese alternative better: 古法编程. It feels like playful self-deprecation, suggesting old-school, handcrafted coding with a wink. Ape coding sounds harsher and more insulting, implying mindless or sloppy work rather than humor.

AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
"Ancient programming", for those who don't read Chinese. (I had to use Google Translate.)

ncr100 7mo ago

Anyone else bothered by ape being overwhelmingly derogatorily slang for black people? 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?

627467 7mo ago
[flagged]
blurbleblurble 7mo ago
Racism sucks and I'm bothered by it tremendously. For example the dog whistles in bored ape yacht club were obnoxious to say the least. But I don't think this is that. This is a silly satire on the ways people are getting tripped up on a fallacy, taking the concept of "ai" as being an autonomous force separable from people way too seriously. It's not of course. It's another iteration of the same old tools.

yomismoaqui 7mo ago

So, are we doing fan-fiction now?

effdee 7mo ago

I prefer the term "classic coding".

shepherdjerred 7mo ago

I think this piece makes an excellent point. 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?"

umairnadeem123 7mo ago

NGL the flaw in this piece is the same flaw in every "AI will replace X" argument - it assumes the bottleneck was ever the typing.it wasn't. the bottleneck is knowing what to build and why.I use AI agents for probably 80% of my code output now and IMO i'm more productive than ever, but only because i spent years "ape coding" first and can immediately tell when the agent is heading somewhere stupid. the people i see struggling with AI coding are exactly the ones who skipped that part. tbf the calculator analogy that keeps coming up in this thread is backwards - nobody is arguing you don't need to understand math to use a calculator. that's literally the point. you DO need to understand it, which is why "ape coding" isn't going away as some niche hobby.it's the prerequisite

gwern 7mo ago

Naturally, when hobbyists spend a lot of time in a single block to get results (as they are unable to parallelize or meaningfully coordinate over multiple invocations of themselves, due to lacking key cognitive capabilities such as embeddings), they refer to it as 'going ape'.

ylee 7mo ago

>The main value of modern ape coding appears to be recreational. Ape coders manifest high levels of engagement during coding sessions and report feelings of relaxation after succeeding in (self-imposed) coding challenges. Competitive ape coding is also popular, with top ranked ape coders being relatively well-known in their communities. 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/ 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.)

satisfice 7mo ago

It’s known as hand-coding. We’ve had this term for many years.

blurbleblurble 7mo ago

I find it hilarious that we needed a [fiction] indicator, friends.

freetonik 7mo ago

I call it Raw Coding, and am even trying to write a fiction book about it: https://leanpub.com/raw-coder https://leanpub.com/raw-coder

rmsaksida 7mo ago
That looks great. I want to read it! The techno caste system reminds me of Lord of Light.
- freetonik 7mo ago
  One of my favorite books, and definitely part of the inspiration.

globular-toast 7mo ago

Why do people think "agent coding" is a skill? There is not a single programmer who is "unable to program with agents". It's like saying Albert Roux was unable to heat up a ready meal in a microwave.

kazinator 7mo ago

Idiots; of course the language that the 𒀯 compiler should be in had better be 𒀯, or else it is a toy language.

remix2000 7mo ago

I shall now drive my fart car back to my cozy meatcave from the public meatspace so that I can do some good old ape coding with my smelly carbon-based friends in peace.

xeonmc 7mo ago

People in this thread discussing the merits of the satire seriously are completely missing the joke over their head that the entire thing was meant to be just a setup for the Rewrite It In Rust punchline. See also: https://longestjokeintheworld.com/ https://longestjokeintheworld.com/

xyzsparetimexyz 7mo ago

Oh fuck off.

lioeters 7mo ago
Flings shit

adrian-vega 7mo ago

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