reading vibecoders talk about how great vibecoding is for engineering real things is like reading bitcoiners talk about how they think money works
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@davidgerard Don't forget the people who gushed about how NFTs would make it possible to buy tickets online, as if that hasn't been a solved problem for decades.
Check out the skills repo (“clawhub”) for this new vibecoded openclaw security disaster, and realise it’s for techbros to manage losing their money betting on “prediction” markets. #Facepalm
@davidgerard There is a whole field of technologies which never seem to transition from hype to something useful. For example in the Telco industry this is "IMS" (IP Multimedia Subsystem). It found a bit of use on 4G and 5G mobile phone networks for reserving bits so you can actually telephone over those networks even though your cell is full, but proponents wants that everywhere... and nobody is buying, since it's ultra complex and more expensive than building excess capacity.
The internet: *foams at mouth how great claude opus 4.6 is*
Claude Opus 4.6: Doing a select on timer.C and when it fires, replacing the timer with nil is the idiomatic way to have an action run only once in go.
Me: but, wouldn't it be better to call timer.Stop(), which stops the timer and makes sure that a select on it would never fire again?
Claude opus 4.6: * proceedes to explain in detail why setting timer (not timer.C) to nil is better *
* Cries in nil pointer dereference *
@davidgerard I think we'll just end up slapping a "free range software" label on hand crafted software. Or "organic" software. Or something.
@davidgerard @gabriel aren’t they calling it ‘artisan’ already?
@davidgerard
This is a real meetup in my local area...
@davidgerard
It's basically its own literary form at this point. You have the overly-italicized personal grindbro introduction about how the founder realized they had been doing it all wrong. the listing of the stack where you say which dozen frameworks and SaaS subscriptions power your paginated CRUD list site and HTML form. The recounting of the SLOC. The disregarding of the legal liability. Etc.
@jonny @davidgerard Those of us who were building “paginated CRUD list sites with an HTML form” 25+ years ago with Perl, PHP, or (yikes) ASP (just plain fscking ASP, no “.NET” underneath)* are looking at this and wondering why a vanilla CRUD site is such an accomplishment, at least for people who also have 25+ years’ development experience under their belt.
* Or in my case, all three, at various times. The pre-.NET ASP wasn’t my choice, though.
@dpnash
@davidgerard
"I realized what we needed was a the last list of pizza recipes, the one that would get it all right.
Flash forward. Claude is cooking. Next.js. Supabase for the toppings tables and Postgres for the doughs (for performance). Lovable is locked in. Bolt is battened down. A little airtable for robustness. Firebase auth plugged into stripe for micro-ingredient transactions. Dual deployment to vercel and netlify with a cloudflare worker for load balancing. A custom WordPress admin page hooked up with a whaletail synchole to prod. I select the final designs from figma and we're done.
40m tokens, 3 days, 456k lines of code, and it's done. pizz.ai."
@jonny @dpnash @davidgerard thanks, I hate it.
still look human written, may want to fix that
“Pizz.ai now being live, it was time to cook up some skills for these recipes. I have my OpenClaw marinating on the Mac mini, so it was time to use it to add some spice. One hundred thousand tokens later, I can turn on the pizza oven and set the temperature from the toilet. By talking *to* the toilet. I did end up hosing off a couple hundred malware skills that showed up to the party, but that’s the price of progress. Smooth, slick, simple. The future.”
Have I got the pattern down right yet? After an entire brain hemisphere threatened to go on strike after forcing it to read about “Gas Town” last month, I refuse on principle to read more than a sentence or two of this sort of thing.
@dpnash @jonny @davidgerard our country is being run by people who read Philip K Dick thought “Ubik” was the first TED talk
@jonny @davidgerard @dpnash
What "Gas Town"?
@musevg @jonny @davidgerard A fever dream from an experienced developer turned vibe coder, who decided what the world needs is (in his words) "Kubernetes for agents", and went ahead and vibe coded *that*.
It's as bad as you could imagine a vibe-coded-Kubernetes-for-agents might sound like. They have a blog post describing the application, which is about 30 screens (on a big desktop monitor) long and reads like a bad trip. We'd have probably heard more about it if Clawdbot...no, wait, Moltbot...excuse me, Openclaw hadn't shown up a couple weeks later and stolen the spotlight.
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@davidgerard Vibecoding is all fun and games until they realize their monster is now 5 years old, production critical and literally touching any part of it will break something else.
I've personally witnessed some really funny cases that aren't that funny for the coder any more.
Just wait for when "Agentic AI" madness hits full speed. It's going to be a horrible couple of years before all of this collapse under its own weight.
@hittitezombie @aamurusko79 they're having trouble getting Agentic AI to hit full speed. viz. it doesn't fuckin work lol
"Let my AI call your AI and decide if the stock goes up or down".
I'm really more and more depressed about this whole madness taking over my industry.
https://www.agbi.com/finance/2026/01/saudi-launches-blockchain-tokenisation-centre-of-excellence/
Cryptocurrency isn't currency. It's tokens gained by "mining".
Mining what? Supposedly mathematical operations but at a huge energy cost.
Cryptocurrency rewards wasteful energy use.
Like AI, it's pointless churn to burn fossil fuels & evade taxation.
Counterfeit leprechaun gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_bitcoin
@davidgerard it feels like half of the replies are agreeing citing their own 'conclusions' as supporting evidence and the other half are 'i don't know anything about programming but make apps now therefore it makes me a programmer'
@davidgerard The last few years really made it painfully obvious how many utterly unqualified opportunists have found their way into computer science.
@lu_leipzig @davidgerard like Linus Torvalds or Kent Beck?
@asci @lu_leipzig what a fatuous driveby reply
@davidgerard Having recently been forced to take a "skill evaluation" on "prompt engineering" at [redacted], (Which I managed to nail simply by guessing the answer they wanted from my decent understanding of the actual workings of LLMs as token-predictors) I can quite confidently say calling whatever that steaming hell-dung is "engineering" is an insult to engineering...
@becomethewaifu @davidgerard It's just engineering for people who don't know what engineering is.
@ColorfulCeleste @becomethewaifu @davidgerard To be fair, the whole field of software engineering is an insult to the actual engineering disciplines. Any mechanical engineer would frown at the things we do while creating software.
@szakib @ColorfulCeleste @becomethewaifu tbf, so do the software engineers
i am more, not less, convinced ai and crypto are closely analogous
Seems like a lot of the same people are behind both.
@davidgerard I'd add that even before ai and crypto we had entrepreneurship, or even physically impossible indiegogo devices. There is an ongoing process of young men who believe that you can manifest revolutionary technology by merely stating what this supposedly future technology is going to achieve, while subcontracting the actual production to investment in whatever providers are nowadays attractive with the forces of market. They merely change the snake oil but the overall pitch remains.
I am now unreasonably pleased that every device I bought on Kickstarter or indiegogo did eventually get made and sold (although often with some compromises for the most extreme features and some took a long time to actually be built)
@gbargoud @davidgerard Fortunately kickstarter always kept a rule requiring the existence of a reasonably working prototype for hardware campaigns, which Indiegogo did not.
That is why some of the worst offenders on Kickstarter were merely financially stupid like the juicero. Indiegogo, on the other hand, gave us bangers like
the "scuba mask that extracts more oxygen from water than its surface can physically touch" https://www.deeperblue.com/triton-underwater-breathing-gill-scam/
or the "laser shaving razor" https://bmmagazine.co.uk/tech/non-existent-laser-razor-hits-indiegogo-after-kickstarter-boot/
@davidgerard @elrohir This has always been my vibe whenever Elon announces anything — it's the same as when a child "invents" something by putting some stickers on a box and writing "TIMƎ MACHINE" on it. It's adorable, but it's not a business plan unless you know how to build it
@davidgerard the Venn diagram is a perfect circle
@davidgerard A few years back, the talk among the crypto folks was “How do I pivot my crypto farm to AI?” It is no accident the playbook seems so incredibly familiar.
@davidgerard yep, you are right. They are both wealth extraction tools that prey on the gullible
You mean cults?
A friend who's also mutual friends with a bunch of ML researchers and engineers minted a crypto coin a few years back for no particular reason and apparently some crypto bros noticed and started speculating that it was an "AI coin" whatever that means and buying it and he had to sit on it for a while until the hype died down to not accidentally scam a bunch of dumbasses.
@davidgerard they belong to the super-class of "grift, but disguised as a complicated economic thing that involves computers"
@floatybirb @davidgerard I'd say it's beyond mere "grift".
It's an active attempt to force basically everyone in developed world to pay them a subscription. This was a thing with crypto (hence people like Peter Thiel funding Ethereum, the Everything blockchain) and that's a thing now with AI (hence the push of "AI as a personal assistant").
@floatybirb @davidgerard @art_codesmith part of what I despise about llm-driven coding is precisely this, they're pushing to turn writing code into a subscription-based service - whether intentionally or not. What worries me is the developers in my own circles who I've seen and heard making statements like "I just couldn't handle the stress of the demands of my day job without these AIs" or "I wouldn't be able to keep up the output required if I went back to writing code by hand".
@davidgerard ibm's quantum ai on the blockchain the most forward-looking of all of us