3 ms·

Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro c

by jchw 4mo ago

Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.

TacticalCoder 4mo ago
Yes what's with that in LLM output? It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that. But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why? Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes? > Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly). It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this: // ------------------------- // ------------------------ // ----- Input Handling ---- // ------------------------ // |--------------+-------+------| // | Potentiometer | Min | Max | // |--------------+-------+------| Which they'll probably "fix" by adding the following vibe-coded tool, of course hidden in their pipeline: ascii_table_to_unicode_mismatch_alignment_fixer(...); What an era.
- trollbridge 4mo ago
  Yes, they’re trained in lots of old code.
- sixothree 4mo ago
  Understanding where they excel and where they are deficient is pretty important.
- jchw 4mo ago
  My guess is that the humans they had in the loop for RLHF just simply preferred the code because it looked superficially tidier. I have the strangest feeling that they didn't always have top notch engineers in the loop at all steps. I suspect this is also how LLM prose gets so utterly bad. Of course, for indentation and ASCII graphics, it would be less prone to breaking constantly in this way if it were not a next-token predictor.
- phatskat 4mo ago
  I feel like the long dashes in comments as dividers is something I’ve seen more in machine-generated code, eg templates, WYSIWYG editors, etc. No doubt I used to be pretty l337 back in my day, and I think I’ve seen it more from tools. I wonder if AI training sets have some bias towards the way the “peers” wrote code.

by jchw 4mo ago

TacticalCoder 4mo ago

Yes what's with that in LLM output? It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that. But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why? Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes? > Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly). It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this: // ------------------------- // ------------------------ // ----- Input Handling ---- // ------------------------ // |--------------+-------+------| // | Potentiometer | Min | Max | // |--------------+-------+------| Which they'll probably "fix" by adding the following vibe-coded tool, of course hidden in their pipeline: ascii_table_to_unicode_mismatch_alignment_fixer(...); What an era.

trollbridge 4mo ago
Yes, they’re trained in lots of old code.
sixothree 4mo ago
Understanding where they excel and where they are deficient is pretty important.
jchw 4mo ago
My guess is that the humans they had in the loop for RLHF just simply preferred the code because it looked superficially tidier. I have the strangest feeling that they didn't always have top notch engineers in the loop at all steps. I suspect this is also how LLM prose gets so utterly bad. Of course, for indentation and ASCII graphics, it would be less prone to breaking constantly in this way if it were not a next-token predictor.
phatskat 4mo ago
I feel like the long dashes in comments as dividers is something I’ve seen more in machine-generated code, eg templates, WYSIWYG editors, etc. No doubt I used to be pretty l337 back in my day, and I think I’ve seen it more from tools. I wonder if AI training sets have some bias towards the way the “peers” wrote code.