Has anyone played extensively with the swathe of "speak english into code" systems out there, from idea through to deployment to an appreciative public? (I haven't...) I'm wondering if, at the end of the day, you still have to be somewhat of a textual code / software engineering native in order to take advantage of this particular present-future of coding? Or if it's truly democratising access to practical computation (i.e. domain specific to the domain of semi-commercial tools, apps, integrations that software engineers work on) I feel a lot of public excitement around it that I'm not feeling -- but as someone keen on encouraging everyone to act computationally for themselves, public excitement is *the metric so I'll admit to being mildly envious 🙂

I feel like it works for a small subset of what a native code speaker can accomplish with the same tools. But for people who are not native code speakers, that's a very large increase over what they could do before. I've seen people use it successfully to create a one-off web UI for a data annotation task, rather than type values into a column in a spreadsheet, and be DELIGHTED by that experience. So it is maybe both very limited and very empowering.

I would like to see a "pro vibe coder" in action to see what it looks like when done right, if anyone has a youtube link or similar please share.

I've had a lot of success using https://bolt.new/ and combined with some techniques from this vibe coding doc: https://github.com/swerner/vibe-coding like taking a short prompt, having Grok or one of the thinking models make you a design doc and just throwing that right into Bolt for a first pass I also released this kind of silly Ruby Gem this weekend called Monkey's Paw (https://worksonmymachine.substack.com/p/introducing-monkeyspaw-a-prompt-driven) where you write descriptions of what you want in markdown files and that's used to render pages for you...

from the starting point of a long time "software engineering native"

this is why I'm curious what the experience is actually like for those who aren't does it feel uncomfortably mysterious but just in a different way? does it feel invitingly capable, then you get hit with some uncanny valleys, and then you're lost again except with some code in your hands that's illegible to you? does it feel unsafe, like you've caught a swamp alligator, and now... what about vibe leaks and vibe attacks and vibe overflows 🤷🏽 i want to be sure to say this isn't snark or criticism -- i'm genuinely wondering how intellectually open and inviting to outsiders this new scene really is when it comes to getting "real work" (open to definition) done.

The idea that operations are written vs. spoken is orthogonal to the act of programming. I believe that the 1% will not find much use for LLM-based programming, regardless of input method. I do, though, think that the 99% will find LLM-based programming to be a useful approach for creating "good enough" software for their needs. ... https://programmingsimplicity.substack.com/p/llm-based-programming?r=1egdky

https://bsky.app/profile/hillelwayne.com/post/3lmgjrjzis22w Hillel is in the 1% and evidently disagrees...

I wonder if that thread contains evidence to counter both extreme viewpoints? It certainly overlooks a much bigger problem, though. Firstly, the example of the junior programmer struggling with vibe coding. The junior was not yet a 1%er and was not benefitting from the use of vibe coding - this counters the extreme viewpoint I was espousing of 99%ers benefitting from LLM-code-generation. The senior programmer - 1%er - showed the junior how to completely skip using vibe and slapped together a 1-liner power shell script. That counters the other extreme viewpoint - there was a simpler way to approach the problem, but the LLM wasn't used. The much bigger problem is: software development is too complicated (https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=766). Even the act of writing small programs is discouraged by what we've got. IMO, smart people should be fixing that problem instead of simply adding to it. LLMs are trained to keep creating complicated software, i.e. LLMs are not much help on that front. [I have strong opinions about the issue of simplifying software development. IMO, bloatware is being caused by forcing ourselves to use one and only one paradigm for all software, i.e. the over-use of blocking "functions", instead of, say, something with a lot less coupling, like relations or SCNs (nano-DSLs) or Parts Based Programming (0D) or ???].