this must be your own fault for posting anything at all on your account

<ducks>

Block early. Block often. Block for any reason. Block for no reason.

I too share a love of esoteria programming languages. I recall learning Haskell (arguably not so esoteric...) and I didn't really understand functional programming, or things like "you cannot change the values of a variable"...and figuring that out broke my brain, in the best way.

Put another way, it's good to learn such languages because, as they say: a mind, once stretched, never returns to its original dimensions!

The Programming Languages course I teach is built around this idea of tinkering with the unfamiliar as a way of learning underlying patterns, and learning how to learn — as opposed to preparing students specifically for graduate research in programming languages (“this semester, we will build a subset of OCaml in OCaml”) or offering a utilitarian pass-the-exam checklist of specific language paradigms and language features. (Both of those can be good courses, but they’re not the one I teach!)

2/

also, my lame claim to fame:

I have programmed in a language that is so esoteric that it does not have a name!

It's the language you use to define a BibTeX style; I was writing a paper and wanted the amsplain style, but with some minor changes...so I puzzled through the BibTeX stuff and eventually figured out how to modify that style to do what I want. 😀

You have it backwards - the Silicon Valley Giants need to be made to pay for their crimes.

Unless you're talking about a wholesale rethinking of copyright. And you aren't.

I'm afraid "vibes coding" already has a pretty negative connotation.

Nobody sees a competent developer being allowed to let go and "program with requirements". They immediately see an incompetent developer YOLOing and shipping broken code.

I"m a bit nervous about "vibe coding" in the sense that i'm concerned it constitutes both a serious skill risk and a serious reputational risk to folks who do it and then ship without the appropriate amount of super rigorous testing.

How can you truly understand the code you're pushing to production when you didn't write any of it?

(Note that I'm not against AI assisted code gen at all and think it's an incredible tool for prototyping and exploration, but then I favor taking ownership of the code and iterating a bunch so you understand it and can get behind the way it functions fully.)

You're SUCH a smart guy doing great work. What am I missing?

After coding with LLMs for a while (both vibe and otherwise), one thing I've realized:

Use these assistants either when:

1. You are proficient/expert with the stack, and you just want to automate tedious stuff

2. You are not proficient and do *not* want to get better at it (e.g. I just want a quick and dirty Bash script - I don't care if it's idiomatic).

If you want to become better at something, code assistants really harm your growth.

Feels like I'm losing the battle on this one, I keep seeing people use "vibe coding" to mean any time an LLM is used to help write code

I'm particularly frustrated because for a few glorious moments we had the chance at having ONE piece of AI-related terminology that had a clear, widely accepted definition!

But it turns out people couldn't be trusted to read all the way to the end of Andrej's tweet, so now we are back to yet another term where different people assume it means different things