gary17the

My best greetings to all Starcraft Elders clanners of yesteryear :).

The Microslop Manifesto hitting the front page of Hacker News and Anthropic Claude servers showing "Partial Outage" at exactly the same time - a coincidence? "I think not."

> Read deeply, write a plan, annotate the plan until it’s right, then let Claude execute the whole thing without stopping, checking types along the way.

As others have already noted, this workflow is exactly what the Google Antigravity agent (based off Visual Studio Code) has been created for. Antigravity even includes specialized UI for a user to annotate selected portions of an LLM-generated plan before iterating it.

One significant downside to Antigravity I have found so far is the fact that even though it will properly infer a certain technical requirement and clearly note it in the plan it generates (for example, "this business reporting column needs to use a weighted average"), it will sometimes quietly downgrade such a specialized requirement (for example, to a non-weighted average), without even creating an appropriate "WARNING:" comment in the generated code. Especially so when the relevant codebase already includes a similar, but not exactly appropriate API. My repetitive prompts to ALWAYS ask about ANY implementation ambiguities WHATSOEVER go unanswered.

From what I gather Claude Code seems to be better than other agents at always remembering to query the user about implementation ambiguities, so maybe I will give Claude Code a shot over Antigravity.

> [Claude Code] "A spiral that generates itself — starting from a tight mathematical center (my computational substrate) and branching outward into increasingly organic, tree-like forms (the meaning that emerges). Structure becoming life. The self-drawing hand."

"And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played." ("Blade Runner 2049", Officer K-D-six-dash-three-dot-seven)

:)

Good to hear that some people out there still have some old-school -style sense of humor.

I have no clue whatsoever as to why any human should pay any attention at all to what a canner has to say in a public forum. Even assuming that the whole ruckus is not just skilled trolling by a (weird) human, it's like wasting your professional time talking to an office coffee machine about its brewing ambitions. It's pointless by definition. It is not genuine feelings, but only the high level of linguistic illusion commanded by a modern AI bot that actually manages to provoke a genuine response from a human being. It's only mathematics, it's as if one's calculator was attempting to talk back to its owner. If a maintainer decides, on whatever grounds, that the code is worth accepting, he or she should merge it. If not, the maintainer should just close the issue in a version control system and mute the canner's account to avoid allowing the whole nonsense to spread even further (for example, into a HN thread, effectively wasting time of millions of humans). Humans have biologically limited attention span and textual output capabilities. Canners do not. Hence, canners should not be allowed to waste humans' time. P.S. I do use AI heavily in my daily work and I do actually value its output. Nevertheless, I never actually care what AI has to say from any... philosophical point of view.

> In retrospect, it made sense. Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation. They are consistent with themselves and your prompt. But respect for the whole, there is not. Respect for structural integrity there is not. Respect even for neighboring patterns there was not.

That's exactly why this whole (nowadays popular) notion of AI replacing senior devs who are capable of understanding large codebases is nonsense and will never become reality.

Sh*t, still no word about "Rocky XXXVIII".[1]

[1] "Airplane!" (1980)

In the mobile app market, a financially-viable or organic (non-paid) long-term marketing plan is the hardest. First testers can be hired. First users can be paid for with Google Ads/Apple Search Ads, etc. Depending on the competition, sustained user-base growth can become a next-to-impossible problem to solve.

I think the only reason vibe coding/prompt engineering seems to be taking over programmers' jobs is the fact that it currently enjoys the status of the latest investment craze/fashion such as blockchain did a few years ago and the dot-com boom did even earlier. In a few years projects based on AI generated code spaghetti will start to quietly fail one after another due to accumulation of technical debt and the necessity for manual, costly codebase rewrites and the whole AI coding train will come crashing down just like all other unrealistic, "new economy" fads before it. Companies will get desperate to hire decent programmers back and things will be back to normal.

Vibe coding/prompt engineering automatically accumulate "technical debt" of spaghetti code and thus with time cause every larger project to fail. Sooner or later you will be asked to fix all that AI mess in your company codebase and when you respond that you are unable to do so without a major, manual rewrite, you will probably get fired. Stay at your job for as long as possible, but start searching for a new position ASAP in an organization that declares up front that they do not intend to use AI for their codebase as a matter of company policy. There are actually companies out there already that make that kind of choice, but it might take a year or two for you to find such a job in the current job market. If all else fails, switch to the Linux kernel/driver development specialty with C/Rust for companies like Canonical.

The Backblaze cloud and restic.

How does all that space out there make you feel about the 30 years of paying off your mortgage for all that 0.25 acres of land you own? ;) J/K