lobsters score: 1 · tags: culture, vibecoding
I’ve been coding for 30 years. I’ve felt like an alien in the tech community for a long time, especially what comes out of the valley. And again I’m going to say something controversial so here goes.
Prior to LLMs software quality across the board, corporate and open source was shit. The software community failed humanity as they relied on our work to run the modern world. This gave us great privilege and also complacency. There were of course pockets of greatness, but on the whole I feel as an industry we failed.
Only 5% of time building software is writing code and now LLMs are good enough at it that people no longer need to rely on that low level skill. However they still need us for complex systems.
The average complexity of software is going to increase and I’m afraid the industry will just continue the slop but at a greater scale.
At the same time LLMs are allowing new people with new thinking to enter the community and we should welcome them. Why? Because thinking has been stagnant in the software world for awhile.
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There were of course pockets of greatness, but on the whole I feel as an industry we failed.
Has there been any industry that was not busy failing humanity until product liability got teeth?
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Probably not and that’s a good point. If you compare our discipline to others it’s pretty new. It’s just a baby compared to say other engineering disciplines, architecture, etc.
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It’s kind of a good point to drastically restrict liability disclaimers in software brought to the market (slightly more narrow than published — excludes open enough stuff) by companies larger than some income / investment / asset threshold. Every word Microsoft says about infeasibility of fixing a bug should go immediately into the case about false advertisement of Copilot.
Of course, one could imagine intermediate steps. If you protect it, you consider it worth protecting. So every issue that the vendor has prevented others from fixing (technical or legal means) and did not promptly fix (industry best practices say 90 days?) gives ground to unlimited product liability, no disclaimers. Let’s say ten years after release as the target, with gradual phase-in.
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Hi @mei thanks for posting this! I’ve seen, felt something similar! I’ve been meaning to craft a blog post myself to spit out some of the thoughts I’ve had on this topic…So, you’ve given me some motivation.
As a bit of a preview, with all the stuff that has been happening, it sure feels like this internet is not our internet. There was at first the arpanet, then the early internet (along with webs 1.0 and 2.0), and now we have the modern internet (including its not-so-great web and its not-so-great social networks)…so what comes next is what i’ll say is post-modern; the postnet (or posternet). I envision a return to smaller communities (like tilde communities), less static/more signal, deeper engagement, but also offline stuff. From the outside, things will appear to have slowed down, but in reality its a way of engaging with other humans that is more deliberate, perhaps enriching in more positive ways. More thoughts soon to come…
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Damn, did you read my mind? Between refreshing this to see a “1 minute ago” and your postnet thoughts that’s really nice. I have had much of the same, but somewhat less developed.
Mostly thinking about what protocols and design adjustments would make the open internet a better place to be, hoping that this could shift social behavior to something good again. Cohost showed me this is possible, to give one example.
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Mostly thinking about what protocols and design adjustments would make the open internet a better place to be, hoping that this could shift social behavior to something good again.
Yes, please, write more and share more of your thoughts! I look forward to reading them!!! :-)
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Happily! Lately I find this more enjoyable than a lot of coding; there’s lots of meaning in design, while the reconciliation phase that constitutes the vast majority of the programming is draining only in its length.
(Maybe this is the production-code-brain talking)
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If you are collecting absurd ideas to fix things where less absurd ideas obviously don’t work: we need true user agents, and maybe the correct thin-interface is accessibility tree? Just to have something where there is any backpressure at all against pushing too much presentation data into the content stream…
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Tech has been making me feel like I don’t belong for a long time now. I’m one of the few people not on social media and still walking around with a dumbphone because the current smartphone duopoly is so unpalatable to me (and I’m afraid I will give into my internet addiction even more than I already do), and holding back on other “modern” tech like smart home stuff. Now this LLM craze is coming in and I see myself resisting yet again and many smart people who I respect falling for it.
It’s nice to see at least some people still care but I also feel it’s a losing battle and we’ll all be swept away by the tide. I worry for my kids who have to live in this society where all this garbage is normalized.
I miss positive alternatives :(
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