Mastodawn

The reason it's considered (by many) acceptable to churn/sling/vibe code using AI is largely due to how we frame development in respect to design. We consider design thinking as both innately human and a non-technical code-free occupation. We think of developers as machines who only encode design.

If developers get replaced by AI, it's only because we dehumanised them already. And the development itself *will* get worse. Because the best developers actually think deeply about their work.

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Craig Stewart May 26

@heydon vibe coding is just the latest attempt to replace expensive, skilled, developers with something cheaper. It's been "codeless" development tools. Now it's AI writing code. But the problem these attempts to replace developers have always faced is exactly what you identify. They're assuming that the value of developers is the ability to write code. It's not, it's the ability to consider a problem space, and identify possible solutions. Code is just a formal description of those solutions.

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Douglas Edwards

@pmb00cs @heydon The effort to replace skilled programmers with something cheaper goes back at least as far as the late 1950s. COBOL was designed in 1959, and its first authoritative description, the CODASYL report, was published in 1960. One of its explicitly stated goals was to make it possible for programming to be done by people who couldn't handle FORTRAN. The result? Skilled programmers were still needed, but they had to grit their teeth and express their conceptual designs in a language designed by and for FOOLS. A phenomenon that continues TO THIS DAY with maintenance of COBOL code.