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   Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Feb-2026 03:52:06 JST Jonathan Hogg

   My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.

   • Rich Felker, Aral Balkan and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 11:39:52 JST Jonathan Hogg

     in reply to

     You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 11:39:53 JST Jonathan Hogg

     in reply to

     I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.

     Aral Balkan and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 11:39:53 JST Jonathan Hogg

     in reply to

     We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.

     Paul Cantrell, Rich Felker and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 11:41:16 JST Jonathan Hogg

     in reply to

     On the gripping hand, if you're a trained programmer using vibe-coding because of a perceived increase in your productivity, or pressure from management to increase your productivity, I would refer you to my first post in this thread…

     Rich Felker and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 11:41:16 JST Jonathan Hogg

     in reply to

     I've seen lots of posts in the last couple of days about how quickly one can write lots of code with AI. I feel perplexed by this as I hate large programs. The largest thing I have written in the last decade is Flitter. It's only 30k lines and I believe very strongly that it is. Still. Too. Big. Even there, I wrote it purposely to allow the stuff I write *in* it to be very smol: mostly no more than 100 lines. That is the maximum I want to write in a day.

     Paul Cantrell, Rich Felker and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 11:41:16 JST Jonathan Hogg

     in reply to

     To me, all these people crowing about having written 10k lines of code in a day are idiots. If you need to write that much code in a day, you are manifestly working at the wrong level of abstraction to solve your problem.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 12:57:30 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @jonathanhogg The reason we don't have HyperCard and the reason ppl think slop coding is productive are one in the same: bad language & framework design imposing ridiculous amounts of boilerplate code on everything. This both makes it hard for beginners to do anything and makes it so there's a lot of "work" (busy work) that a sloppy pattern copying machine can do decently well at.

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     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 26-Feb-2026 16:26:29 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @jonathanhogg By design… why simplify when your ability to hire thousands of engineers means you’re safe from competition? Why simplify when your “specialist knowledge” (of overly-complex crap) fetches lucrative consulting fees. Capitalism incentivises mediocrity with high barriers of entry. The complexity is a feature, not a bug. That’s why most of the mainstream stack is useless to us for Small Tech/Small Web. And why it’s essential that we embrace simplicity in the alternatives we’re building.