I'm not. At least I'm not doing stuff in Python (spits). I've hand coded assembler and fine tuned C for many years. Even to the point of reorganising code paths because of processor limitations. and up until 10 years ago was teaching assembler at a university (till it was dropped)
There was a point in the 80s where I thought anybody writing in C was a poof. Only real programmers wrote in assembler. Then GEM programming was a pain in the arse with like 70% of your code being pushing things on the stack to make function calls. Sod it, move up, write the clever stuff in ASM, boring UI stuff in C. Compilers got better, CPUs more complicated to the point that unless you're talking things like image processing and the like where languages don't really deal will with all the extended vector processing too well. however due to out of order execution and the like you'd be hard pressed to write better/faster code and not really worth the effort.
And on top of that programming has become less of 'doing clever stuff with a language' to "assembling layer upon layer of software you didnt write (libraries) to do something. I was using cakephp a while ago, looking to move up to new version and it just created hundred of files. layers upon layers of shit i didnt write and have no idea what it does.
These days you average programmer is an assembler of parts doing for the most part doing mind numbing ui shit. your average app is like 80% shit you didn't write, 15% ui shit, 5% clever stuff.
I mean can you call yourself a programmer if you rely on the library sort routine? surely a real programmer would write their own implementation? no, we just move up the chain. no more handling WM_PAINT and drawing your own stuff, use a presentation library or html/css.
now outside of the 'clever' stuff (im still reverse enginerering files and shiz and writing low level libraries) but the ui stuff.. well as obi wan said - coding is for droids. so all the stuff ive up at splunge.foo is a mixture of human and ai coded stuff. like the batch image processor. yeah i could write that, would have taken at least a few weeks (because I would have got pissed off/bored), looked much worse, have less features and definately have no mobile support. the only clever bit is knowing what to create and what an app should look like. i couldn't find something that did what i want but the amount of effort to make it by hand was not worth it. so it was vibe coded. You may not need to use it. But if you refuse to use it because it was 'vibe coded' even though it works... that's pretty sad.
and again like the roland sound tool up there. that's the process of a lot of time reverese engineering, distilled to a text file description and ai created it. bit it didn't just appear out of nowhere, it needs a guiding hand. like i'm a manager of a software team. And the above caveats apply.
ultimately I realised I'm less interested in "programming" than just creating. fixing a problem. making life easier in some way.
and because of the the big C i'm medically retired, but always had plans to re-write the s/w I had written for the uni I was working at (and we were at least 5 years ahead of everybody) but that didn't come to pass. But I fed the basic data structure and some description into claude and it came up with the front end/back end for a fairly complicated data structure in about 15 mins. weeks of work i did previously done in an instant.
Most 'coding' work should be done by business analysts. Programming as a job has survived as its "vodoo" to most people but really most of it isn't really needed. you'll need to top end guys in all fields but your average programmer is going the way of the dodo. partially because if python is the language of choice nobody gives a shit about performance now as computers are fast enough. back in the day i wrote a grid view for a bank that was just *slightly* slower than excel on a page refresh (like those days when you could see the whole page refresh in half a second). Everything is so powerful now you'd not notice.
its funny because its like what we do on the site. object aware selection? thats ML. spot healing etc all algorithms. yet we're not calling for people to use Photoshop 1.0 with one level of undo because we are so hard and cool.
(, Mon 18 May 2026, 22:43, Reply)
The abstraction thing is true,
but the 80% you didn't write at least used to be consistent, supported and documented by nerds of the highest order.
Personal projects are different but as far as I can tell, you need to already be able to code to a high level to be able to code anything professional with AI. As it stands, it feels like a lot of code debt piling up for the future, and a lot of people going to get hacked because they were lied to about its capability by Magic Sam et al.
(
monkeon schmonkeon, Mon 18 May 2026, 23:29,
Reply)
but fleshys may not be that great anyway. and writing documentation is now an AI job.
Yes a knowledge of coding/systems absolutely helps as you can guide it in the right direction. like instead of generating hundreds of elements with 'onclick' in them, you direct it to add a bubble click handler at the parent, the kind of thing I do now.
Unless you're chasing the beam on an atari 2600, creating a program should not be exclusive to masters of the universe. In some ways it never has been. VB, Filemaker, Foxpro, DBase, whatevs. Reduces the barrier to creation of business specific functionality. Or recording macros in Excel. Even things like Juice takes all the complexity of writing cross platform audio apps. We don't accuse them of cheating.
But this is AI as it is now. It's only going to get better. And your job as an engineer will be to review changes, like you would do as a committer on any large project with a bunch of randoms underneath.
And as for me its like 10x-15x faster. writes better docs, adds more error checking than I ever would. It hardly matters either as nobody gives a crap about what i produce. very niche. dont want to spend weeks on shit that gets 60 views on its best week ever. as you (might) know, time is limited (lung biopsy later this week but its pretty clear its spread to the lungs). can't be bothered to hand code anything unless it really needs it. which all this stuff doesn't.
(, Tue 19 May 2026, 0:19, Reply)
What makes you think it's only going to get better?
History of AI has always tended to come up against an unbudgeable problem, and there seems to be potentially a lot of those in the LLM approach.
Enshittification has begun price-wise.
The product they are selling to people would not need you to direct it how to do things properly. It only works for you because you can code, and it sounds like that's all you need for your use case, but I suspect that's a minority of their users.
(And sorry to hear about shit you're going through.)
(
monkeon schmonkeon, Tue 19 May 2026, 10:12,
Reply)
I use GIMP 2.10 with no AI, & one linear undo (not sure how many levels, I'm more of an oh well, plough on kind of guy).
It does not have object aware selection, spot healing, or anything like whatever the fuck that shit is. You'd have to pay me to use photoshop, and you'd have to pay for the licence too as I refuse to rent software.
I use FLS20, no AI, one linear undo, ditto. I once made a stochastic composition tool in SynthEdit (an IDE that spits out bloated C++ to make oversized dll files), kind of a super rudimentary 'AI' jam-alonger, and it was shit. Never released it, never even shared it.
I was once vaguely enthusiastic about AI music and art tools, but sadly they have not materialised and what we have instead are prompt boxes that spit out pure shame.
As I understand it, AI vibe code is worse than that generated from an IDE, and is worse for the environment than a fucking cocaine farm in the Amazon. You don't need to make any undocumented insect species go extinct to have fun on a computer. Surely that's the main source of shame that *you people* should be feeling.
(
brb Monkhouse Stampede, Tue 19 May 2026, 0:18,
Reply)
dude our entire lives have been built on people fucking the environment. Unless you live like a medieval monk that's still going on. So much basics even in supermarkets is out of season, yet we get it by forcing it in foreign countries and bringing it in by jet. I'm probably using less CO2 than most people even with the odd AI use, haven't had a car in 20 years, haven't flown for 20 years. Only willing to travel about 1.5-2 hours by train.
And IDE's don't generate code unless you engage AI. And no, it can generate some really clever code. Better than some stuff i've done. And will write you tests for it as well. Problem is in complexity, the more complex the system, unless you are very strict on telling it things it will just create "hacks". Something that works but isn't scalable or reusable.
Also a lot of the basic stuff I do with local llm on my macbook pro m5. draws about 25 watts with the gpu maxed out (qwen 3.6 35b) less than my pc needs to just idle. only use claude/codex for the more complex parts.
(, Tue 19 May 2026, 0:48, Reply)
and just to add... why is ai so bad? there are approx 125 million playstations in circulation. at 250w as an average power draw, when on that would be 31.250 billion watt hours per hour of use. thats just playstation. add in x box and PC drawing twice as much - just to shoot aliens in the face in FPS... isn't that a bad use of energy?
Should we waste any money/energy/time broadcasting eastenders? Allow cars that don't have 50mpg+ on the road (and locked so you can't reduce that by driving like a twat) ?
(, Tue 19 May 2026, 1:24, Reply)
When I used IDEs, LLMs were not a thing, AI data centres were not a thing,
AI was what you used in single player computer games. The entire purpose of IDEs was to move boxes, connect with lines, and output code. Not sure why you think AI is involved in SynthEdit, or Macromedia Dreamweaver circa 2001, or why you think a virtual instrument/effect can exist without code, or why the actual html output by Dreamweaver isn't code. Maybe our lexicons are at odds with each other.
I'm not impressed with your cherry picked wattages. Playstations are not all run at the same time, 24 hours a day. Datacentres are using 6% of our total national electricity output, 15% of worldwide energy output. Energy depletion from Playstation use is, one assumes, comparatively negligible, because I can't find any headlines or studies about it. Nobody seems to be worried that use of game consoles is driving up energy prices or causing mass extictions. You might be onto something though, perhaps you should publish a paper to get the ball rolling.
Your nihilistic attempt at diminishing the importance of environmental harm is not an impressive argument. It is undermined by your insistence that you do care about your own personal carbon footprint (a false argument literally invented by the oil industry to shift blame from the powerful architects of the energy structure to the individual powerless consumers).
Much of the out of season food you worry about is grown locally under grow lights these days. Thank the cannabis industry for the improvements in energy efficiency that has allowed that to happen. Very little food is brought in by jet, around 1% of the volume of global trade is 'shipped' by air. Not really something to worry about in the grand scheme of things.
Ultimately we will have to decide on a case by case basis just what energy consumption is worthwhile, and every day the problem becomes more urgent. Musk's Starlink eco-terror experiment could wipe out the ozone layer in 20 years meaning we won't have to worry about any of this.
(
brb Monkhouse Stampede, Tue 19 May 2026, 15:59,
Reply)
You people use YouTube, which consumes a vast amount of energy and has been using AI for years.
(
Mudface The web isn't callipygian, Tue 19 May 2026, 7:15,
Reply)
Fair point well made.
I wish broadcast media was still relevant to my interests and everyone else's. I lament the destruction of our shared cultural experience. I think it started when cable and satellite TV became mainstream, kids tv was ghettoised, and 'narrowcasting' became profitable.
I employ an increasing number of plugins/extensions to filter out AI elements from youtube, btw. I *hate* GPT scripts, robot voices (sometimes I can only tell when they fuck up the intonation or emphasis on subject-specific terminology), and bullshit visuals. I long for a more local and AI-free alternative, and I'm not alone.
(
brb Monkhouse Stampede, Tue 19 May 2026, 16:19,
Reply)
"Most 'coding' work should be done by business analysts. Programming as a job has survived as its "vodoo" to most people but really most of it isn't really needed" - I've never though about it like that but it's true - the people worth their salt were the ones who could do both but now I'm more than happy to let AI do the heavy lifting.
(, Wed 20 May 2026, 16:06, Reply)
