People use software for specific features, but most software have lots of features people never use or need. A lot of modern software is designed to handle lots of users, so they need to be scalable, deployable, etc.
I don't need any of that. I just need the tool to do the thing I want it to do.
I'm not thinking about end users, I just need to solve my specific problem.
Sure there might be better pieces of software out there, which do more things.
But the vibe coded thing works quite well for me and I can always fix it by prompting the model.
For example, I've vibe coded a tool where I upload an audio file, the tool transcribes it and splits it into 'scenes' which I can sync to audio via a simple UI and then I can generate images for each scene. Then it exports the video.
It's simple, a bit buggy, lacks some features, but it does the job.
It would have taken me weeks to get to where I am now without having written one manual line of code.
I need the generated videos, not the software. I might eventually turn it into a product which others can use, but I don't focus on that yet, I'm solving my problem. Which simplifies the software a lot.
After I'm finished with this one, I might generate another one, now that I know exactly what I want it to do and what pitfalls to avoid. But yeah, the age of industrial software is upon us. We'll have to adapt.
How about you try vibe coding a banking app or tax filing or pay roll app?
Most commercial software is nowadays integrated into the real world in ways that can't be replicated by code alone, software which isn't like this can be easily replaced yes, but that kind of software already had free alternatives.
In the dial-up era, the industry was young, there were no established players, it was all a big green field.
The situation is far from similar now. Now there's an app for everything and you must use all of them to function, which is both great and horrible.
From my experience, current generation of AI is unreliable and so cannot be trusted. It makes non-obvious mistakes and often sends you off on tangents, which consumes energy and leads to confusion.
It's an opinion I've built up over time from using AI extensively.
I would have expected my opinion to improve after 3 years, but it hasn't.
I'm very skeptical about such a future. The 'world' is already high tech. We're already drowning in products and entertainment.
At the same time, a million people talk to chatgpt about suicide each week, there's an epidemic of loneliness, mental health issues, wars, famines, pollution, climate change and the list goes on.
Work is not just about earning wages. A lot of people find a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, community, pride and joy in the work they do.
For many it's also about the hierarchy, the title, the career ladder, etc.
I for one don't see how more automation / tech is going to fix the fundamental problems that the previous waves of automation have left behind.
Easy. You're 3x more productive for a while and then you burn yourself out.
Or lose control of the codebase, which you no longer understand after weeks of vibing (since we can only think and accumulate knowledge at 1x).
Sometimes the easy way out is throwing a week of generated code away and starting over.
So that 3x doesn't come for free at all, besides API costs, there's the cost of quickly accumulating tech debt which you have to pay if this is a long term project.
You conflate efficient usage of AI with "vibing". Code can be written by AI and still follow the agreed-upon structures and rules and still can and should be thoroughly reviewed. The 3x absolutely does not come for free. But the price may have been paid in advance by learning how to use those tools best.
I agree the vibe-coding mentality is going to be a major problem. But aren't all tools used well and used badly?
The population (especially the youth) is anesthetized by social media, shorts, fear-inducing news, economic hopelessness, climate extremes..
In the meantime, everything is getting integrated - banks, tax systems, tech platforms. Now this age verification..
And of course, AI is being implemented everywhere so that no one can evade the big brother.
As it stands now, this Internet is no longer salvageable imo.
Doesn't Clojure already support all of those features ?
Eg.
> transducer-first design, laziness either eliminated or opt-in
You can write your code using transducers or opt-in for laziness in Clojure now. So it's a matter of choice of tools, rather than a feature of the language.
> protocols everywhere as much as practically possible (performance)
Again, it's a choice made by the programmer, the language already allows you to have protocols everywhere. It's also how Clojure is implemented under the hood.
-> first-class data structures/types are also CRDT data types, where practical (correctness and performance)
Most of the programs I worked on, did not require CRDT.
I'm inclined to choose a library for this.
> first-class maps, vectors, arrays, sets, counters, and more
Isn't this the case already ? If Clojure's native data structures are not enough, there's the ocean of Java options..
Which leads to a very interesting question:
How should the 'real' AGI respond to your request ?
> first-class maps, vectors, arrays, sets, counters, and more
That's my mistake; this line was intended to be a sub-bullet point of the previous line regarding CRDTs.
> the language already allows you to have protocols everywhere
The core data structures, for example, are not based on protocols; they are implemented in pure Java. One reason is that the 1.0 version of the language lacked protocols. All that being said, it remains an open question what the full implications of the protocol-first idea are.
> You can write your code using transducers or opt in for laziness in Clojure now. So it's a matter of choice of tools, rather than a feature of the language.
You 100% can. Unfortunately, many people don't. The first thing people learn is (map inc [1 2 3]), which produces a lazy sequence. Clojure would never change this behavior, as the authors value backward compatibility almost above everything else, and rightly so. A transducer-first approach would be a world where (map inc [1 2 3]) produces the vector [2 3 4] by default, for example.
This was mentioned by Rich Hickey himself in his "A History of Clojure" paper:
(from paper) > "Clojure is an exercise in tool building and nothing more. I do wish I had thought of some things in a different order, especially transducers. I also wish I had thought of protocols sooner, so that more of Clojure’s abstractions could have been built atop them rather than Java interfaces."
"But that server is faulty!! If it has to handle multiple requests at once, it starts to break down."
Ok. I know this is all hypothetical. But I don't buy this premise.
Why is the server faulty ? In what way does it fail ?
How do you know it's because it's processing more than one request at a time ?
What if there are multiple clients each doing one request only ?
Do you have control over the server code ? If so, fix it there!
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The point is, this solution is fixing the wrong problem and introducing a new one down the line.
If the bug on the server gets fixed, you've now implemented an artificial performance bottleneck on the client.
Devs who know about it are going to leave the org, others are going to try to 'optimize' the code around it with other hacks, since by allowing these kinds of fixes you're building to the wrong kind of culture.
Always fix the root issue.
It's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against.
Here's a simple theoretical situation.
A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt.
Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write.
The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night starts soon.
Who has bigger chances of surviving ? I guess most people would bet on the tribesman. Why does nature select the person who would most likely score lower on the IQ score ?
The point is - intelligence is contextual and circumstantial. It's not one number, like width or length.
Not sure why people still try to squeeze some sort of conclusion from it..
I believe you're confusing knowledge and intelligence. This is effectively like saying intelligence is circumstantial because Mike Tyson could punch through the mathematician's head in the boxing ring. You're comparing an ability (intelligence) to a skill (jungle stuff).
To accurately test the jungle guy's intelligence you'd need to devise a test that doesn't require reading nor writing (skills he hasn't yet developed). The point is to test how well his brain works, not what he's learned. With physical testing there are similar situations, where two people can have the same strength and endurance but one of them can achieve more with it due to certain skills like dance or being Mike Tyson.
I think a more valid comparison would be that you have two tribesmen who have lived in the jungle all their lives, but one has a very low IQ, while one has a very high IQ. Both crash land in the jungle. Who has the bigger chance of surviving?
You're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better.
Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research.
The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.
> but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.
In a hostile environment a lack of prior experience or a lack of guidance with prior experience can mean death in a few days. The mathematician has no time to update priors. A nutritional deficit or a lack of adequate shelter will result in a rapid cognitive decline.
IQ as a predictor of health seems like the most relevant point in the research to this hypothetical situation.
Even so called "emotional intelligence" has been shown to been closely linked to general intelligence.
Turns out being smarter makes you better at reading people's emotions from stimuli details.
This kind of bullshit has been "invented" because there is a belief that intelligent people are "bad" socially when in fact they just don't care or are bored/annoyed when hanging around "regular" people.
This study shows one of the reasons: it is difficult to communicate and reason with other people when their prediction/description of stuff is systematically very wrong.
Plenty of people are working very hard to redefine "intelligence" because reality hurts their egos. There is still nonsensical debate about being able to measure it and whatnot even though the research has constantly shown the truth for quite a while now.
I guess that at the start of formalized measures like the meter there were plenty of people to contest how "stupid" it was because it made them shorter than they liked to pretend.
The applicable experiment for IQ would be to take two ”equal” populations (say,1000 ppl with middle-class background each), sort by IQ, cut the sample set at the middle to lower than median, and higher than median group.
The statistics so far show that the upper median group will do better on average. One might end up in jungle but it does not really matter for our experiment.
For individuals, IQ is sort of statistical proxy for lots of things if your daily life is lived in a first world country.
But it’s insane to hold it as some sort of key indicator of fundamental human potential.
In population statistical situations, like when hiring, however, imho it does make sense to prefer high iq individuals. Not because of what it tells of a single candidate’s potential, but it acts as a sort of maxwells demon for the workforce as total. So you end up with a employee pool closer to above-median group in our experiment which may or may not provide better business outcomes.
This is basically false; you might make it true if you cut somewhere other than the middle, but famously IQ has non-uniform reliability (it's heteroskedastic? is that the way to say it?). Pop science and nerd culture have fixated on it as a global ranking of people by cognitive capability, but it's not that at all; past a threshold, the actual numbers (and test-test reliability) get really noisy.
This should make intuitive sense, because IQ was designed as a diagnostic, one in a battery of diagnostics, for people with cognitive dysfunction. It's a useful tool to deploy when you have a patient who, for instance, can't seem to progress in reading class or whatever. It's broadly misapplied in studies like this (but then, this study has deeper faults than that).
In this case you're talking about some information that the professor doesn't know. We don't know if he would or wouldn't have naturally excelled at that if he had been born in that environment.
I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.
Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).
Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.
Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.
This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.
I could care less. If it isn't intelligence, it's net worth, or body count. People like to gloat what they have, and then complain about those who have what they don't.
