dev0p

Skill issue

Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.

For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art? Is the game itself art or just the textures, 3d models and locations and enemies and everything else that it produces? Though only the code generates everything, like in demoscenes, so is the code art?

Kind of subjective really.

There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.

I can safely say, especially with how close to actual perfection Claude Opus 5.5 is, that it's no longer the case.

Also people generally hate change. The ethical concerns around AI are also understandable and I agree with the vast majority of them, but the vast majority of the "AI BAD" crowd are simply irrationally angry at it and completely unwilling to engage with it in any kind of good faith.

They'll come around. I'm starting to see some change in the gaming community, which was 200% against any form of AI just a little while ago, and now that they're using it to reverse engineer, decompile, mod and mesh together old games there is a lot of people starting to say "Yeah AI is bad, but...".

There is some CRAZY stuff being being worked on which are objectively good for society as a whole which would have you sound insane just last year, and it's only going to get crazier with each new model.

Demoscene

I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points

> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen

That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.

That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".

Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.

The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:

> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.

> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.

> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.

> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?

Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.

But, again, that has always been true!

How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.

And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.

> Code as Art

Code is code.

Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.

If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.

If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.

Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.

This kind of mindset baffles me.

Of the story? No.

Of our society as we know it? Maybe.

Yeah no that can't be good

Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.

Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.

Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.

And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.

tl;dr yes, also water is now even wetter.

Did you try it?