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   Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 14-Mar-2025 18:58:32 JST Aral Balkan

   Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanidng what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

   When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.

   #AI #VibeCoding #design #development #making #creation #artiface #craft #coding #programming #technology #humanity

   • Embed this notice
     Daniel Supernault (dansup@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Mar-2025 19:06:05 JST Daniel Supernault

     in reply to

     @aral Well said!

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 00:01:32 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Alfonso Muñoz-Pomer Fuentes

     @alfonsomunozpomer Any library worth adding to your project is written by people who have spent extensive time and effort in the problem domain. It has vigorous tests and is actively maintained. None of that is true for AI-generated code which is more akin to adding the first Node module that comes up in a npm search and hoping for the best. In fact, no, you’d likely still get higher quality code that way due to npm’s default algorithm surfacing higher quality libraries.

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     Alfonso Muñoz-Pomer Fuentes (alfonsomunozpomer@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 00:01:33 JST Alfonso Muñoz-Pomer Fuentes

     in reply to

     @aral But so many times you just want a library to do some specific thing, you don’t care a lot about its implementation, so you add it to your project without looking at the code. Maybe you heard it’s good, you have a look at the download count or the commit history to see if it’s actively maintained, but in the end it’s not critical and it could be replaced without much consideration. In the same way AI-generated code is useful in similar cases.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 00:03:49 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Todd Knarr

     @tknarr What a horrible existence.

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     Todd Knarr (tknarr@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 00:03:50 JST Todd Knarr

     in reply to

     @aral This is breaking down, though. The last decade I've noticed developers are less and less interested in understanding their code and working on it. They want to just get something that passes tests and move on to the next thing, and if it breaks in production they'll put that in the queue to fix.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 00:05:54 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @meetdheeraj 💕

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     Dheeraj (meetdheeraj@mstdn.io)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-2025 00:05:55 JST Dheeraj

     in reply to

     @aral thanks for writing this.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 16-Mar-2025 18:02:30 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • nisha :questified:

     @nisha Not sure the sculpting analogy holds. Michelangelo didn’t start with Peter and remove the bits he didn’t like to arrive at David; he started with a block of marble.

     (And his chisel didn’t require new fossil fuel power plants and data centres that contaminate fresh water at a time when humanity faces an existential threat of its own making to its own habitat.)

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     nisha :questified: (nisha@social.afront.org)'s status on Sunday, 16-Mar-2025 18:02:31 JST nisha :questified:

     in reply to

     @aral I’ve been using claude.ai to do basic web development - a thing I’m not very good at. I do get a wall of code, but I know enough about how code generally works and where the the functionality I want is located that I can trim out the pieces I don’t want and modify the pieces I do want to get the final result.
     I think a good art analogy is sculpting, where rather than mould the medium, you take away from the medium. Either way, you still need to understand and practice.