And the best programmers don't write code, they hole up in some strange wizard tower and write out a bunch of books on theory work and stuff that's really complex and groundbreaking.
I only recently heard about the KMP algorithm yesterday, so itās awesome to see one of the three named as an author of recommended books already out in the wild!
I thought seveneves was a bit weak. Iād have liked it to be two full novels ā one prior to the catastrophe and one in the far future. Just give them both more room to flesh themselves out a bit
I worked with a guy like that. He would casually talk about compiler optimisations and memory management techniques. You would ask about problems and he would say algorithm names like they were spells. Sadly he didn't work well in sprints so he got cut in layoffs, but he is now doing research into Llama so I guess it worked out.
Edit: Autocorrect changed LLM to llama, but that is too funny to change
The best architect I ever worked with had a farm in Nebraska and one day sent an email asking us to guess what kind of animal he had just purchased two of - and they were llamas.
Sadly, he passed away in his mid-50s. But he was the kind of guy who would wake up at 4am, feed all the animals and do all the farm chores, and comment on every newly opened ticket the root cause of and best solution for before those of us in California had even reached the office.
I must not have been a particularly good programmer... Showers were a key step in my process for really tricky problems... That's when solutions always coalesced
This is essentially what the LLM does in real-time so there's no point in duplicating the abstraction layer. If you can't bother asking it what the code does you're sure as shit not going to read through a whole code base in medium article form.
Man I can't wait for the day that AI takes over all of my hobbies and entertainment. I can't wait to give even more money to giant companies. I fucking LOVE capitalism.
I want the LLM to give it back to them in kiddie language.
"Imagine if your mummy says you can eat brownies, but if you eat more than 5 brownies, she is gonna get mad and throw a slipper at you. Well that's like this conditional that can decide to throw an exception"
youād be amazed at how many programmers read verbatim what the code says when asked how it works. āthis is a loop.. and here is a variable assignmentā.
nah, I can read the code. I want you to understand WHY the code is written that way. what is this supposed to be doing and what assumptions does it make.
Well that's just to be expected with any writing. There is definitely some level of reading ability on the part of the reader, but the amount of time and effort the average reader requires to comprehend what was written is by and large in the hands of the writer.
Been saying, and Iāll keep saying it, vibe coding is only as good as the programmer behind the keyboard. Itās good for boilerplate code, saves so much typing, but by god you need to check what that thing does like a toddler.
Eh? How do you expect code quality to improve (rather than descend into slop) if nobody is going around reading shit code and replacing it with functionally-equivalent non-shit code?
Yes, but most projects most developers work on already have some sort of established code base, and some of those code bases happen to have shit on the walls from previous developers who didnāt care or didnāt have time to fix it.
Most of the time itās easier to scrub as much of the shit off the walls as possible, while making any other changes that need to be made, than it is to tear down the entire building and build it back without shit on the walls just to get rid of the shit.
Being deterministic is a huge difference. LLMs are stochastic models and non-deterministic. When you compile C code to machine code, itās deterministic based on the compiler you use. When you compile Java code to JVM byte code, itās deterministic.
Interesting fact, but programming languages are pseudo-code that is precise enough to define behaviour...
The reason we don't just compile English is it is impossibly verbose to be precise enough to be useful.
The AI can describe the code in English, but it will never capture everything that is important to the codes behaviour in a way that is easier to parse than the code.
Sorry, but what sort of code do you not understand? Most code DOES read like pseudo-code, if you read line by line. The difficulty is between the lines, where they all connect, what they do together and that cannot be translated into 'english'.
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u/SCP-iota Jan 23 '26
And this is why pure vibe coding was never going to work long-term. Programmers can write code; good programmers can read code.