Imagine Adam Back literally on Epstein island, completely oblivious to what's happening, trying and failing to discuss sidechain innovations with the clientele
> But I do think there will be an effort to cut costs by switching work loads to cheaper models, resulting in the gradual enshittification of LLM tools along with everything else in our declining dollar economy.
A really funny thing here is that Claude Code itself is a testament to this. That software itself is vibecode piece of shit. Authors opencode always making fun of it. Good example I saw from today
> StackOverflow’s traffic has declined to 10% of where it was only 5 years ago.
This is a great point. StackOverflow's death is poisoning the well. We need something like StackOverflow in order for these tools to continue getting better.
> At first glance, LLMs seem like an ideally convivial tool ... The trajectory of the LLM society is decisively anti-convivial.
Great insight, well articulated.
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In general, great article. Thanks for writing it. Much to think about.
> But do we know what we’re giving up when we apply this style of programming? The proliferation of average is the sacrifice of the weird . Typescript displaces Clojure. Idiosyncratic coding styles are swallowed under a wave of monotone. Deep understanding of a problem is replaced by a rat’s nest of exponential backoff, try/catch, and convergent interfaces. Minds skim across the surface of understanding like rocks on a lake. Programming pearls are cast before swine.
Loved this paragraph. This is really true so far.
But I'm not sure how long it will last. I've used AI to write some C, a lot of Zig and now starting to write Odin. I would have never touched these before and it's been a great learning experience.
Another example - I've never enjoyed making nostr apps manually but I really enjoy vibecoding them. I don't share them because they are slop, but I actually use my own client to make like 1/2 of my posts. It's a great feeling. Feels sovereign.
I also built a web browser that could run super simple react apps (https://github.com/justinmoon/frontier). That was really neat. I learned a lot about the web platform which I didn't previously know.
So I'm hopeful that these tools over time will also allow people to pursue their weird interests too?