> I characterized coding agents as camels in RotJD, and that metaphor still has legs. Four of them. But I find it difficult, as a writer, to convey the siren-song allure of coding agents when I'm describing them as a bunch of camels gurgling at me. So they're… baby camels? Regardless, they’re like toddlers, but with proper supervision and food preparation, they're absolute brutes at writing code. I can't bring myself to leave when my brutes are hungry. I've tried, it's a no-go. I have to run a practiced escape plan every night to get my computer closed by 2am. First I get them all spinning at once. Then I leap up, run out of the room, slam the door, jam my fingers in my ears, and sprint away shouting lalalala. It is perhaps not the most refined of plans, and doesn't have a great success rate. My babies need me.
Amdahl's law in action: the economic gain from coding agents is ultimately bottlenecked by the slowest serial component in the system. In this case... Steve Yegge himself.
Which is why the goal is to replace Yegge entirely. Even the perfect coding assistant which makes Yegge 100x more productive is still 100x worse than full replacement and running 10,000 virtual Yegges in parallel. Why settle for 1%?
"and then I send it on its birdy way, out into the wide world of my unprotected hard disk, network, and bank account."
eek
You do that.
Would this guy have said these things if he had not been sending other AIs to write what he thought, this whole time? I find I'm studying this screed as if turning over a rock. Fascinated, concerned, dismayed.
The real punchline would be that the guy's died but left some machines to continue to post in his absence. If one hand claps in the forest but there's nobody to hear, is he still shit in the woods?
Yeah, I bet you never go back. Intermittent reinforcement is well documented to produce that effect. I would say "wait till someone notices the possibilities in what a compulsion loop you've set yourself into here," but of course who has and hasn't noticed that is mostly pretty easy to tell.
Oh my god I thought I'd be angry at him like I usually am when he writes another one of his sell-out pieces but I'm not even a third of the way through and my response is between pity and revulsion at what he's describing.
He made his life a kind of hell I wouldn't wish my worst enemy: he's now fully a slave to the machine. What started as a sales pitch turned rapidly into a disturbingly transparent exercise in self-loathing
He is sure AIs are the solution. That is the theme of all his writing. I'm sure he gets his paycheck for saying so.
The problem then, as he makes clear, is the collapse of everything else. His own self-worth, for example, he finds gone at the moment it's most important to him. In the post he just sounds a little too honest, which is how engineers usually sound when they're burning out -- no mystery considering the draining relationship he describes having to his work.
This is the same contradiction he cannot address elsewhere: is his talent 1000% leveraged because he is an uber-god programmer? Is he addicted to a powerful and expensive drug? Is his involvement in his work so inconsequential that he could just be playing video games? Is AI sheparding the most valuable work in society because it has unlimited potential? Or are these people just leaderboarding to slurp up a limited pool of value while dunking on the people working to expand the boundaries of what is possible in the human world?
"I'm sorry, Iñigo, I didn't mean to vibe it so hard."
But seriously: as an attorney, I find that this writing perfectly reflects what I imagine it must be like to live inside the head of someone who agentic-vibe-codes for a living. It's all over the map; pulled (and pulling the reader) in a dozen different directions; non-standard; mixing metaphors and idioms; likely 20x longer than it ought to be; and almost able to figure out its own point in the pastiche as it flails around.
I imagine that the coding results of the process described would be similar. Would that be an accurate prediction?
The author has been blogging about software development for I think 20 years or so, and has long had a somewhat freewheeling style. So I don't think this is attributable entirely to the subject matter.
I wonder if his writing got weaker this last decade, or just the style got passé and isn't appreacited anymore? I remember LOVING his essays and those last ones I kinda feel nothing. Maybe its with me, I'm not feeling that much anymore.
Also, after explaining how society is moving at extraordinary pace, you write a book, and don't even have a link yet? I feel exactly like him though (old) but trying to join the fun.
Readit News
Amdahl's law in action: the economic gain from coding agents is ultimately bottlenecked by the slowest serial component in the system. In this case... Steve Yegge himself.
Which is why the goal is to replace Yegge entirely. Even the perfect coding assistant which makes Yegge 100x more productive is still 100x worse than full replacement and running 10,000 virtual Yegges in parallel. Why settle for 1%?
eek
You do that.
Would this guy have said these things if he had not been sending other AIs to write what he thought, this whole time? I find I'm studying this screed as if turning over a rock. Fascinated, concerned, dismayed.
The real punchline would be that the guy's died but left some machines to continue to post in his absence. If one hand claps in the forest but there's nobody to hear, is he still shit in the woods?
Thanks to AI, we have the power to bankrupt an entire category of laborer.
He made his life a kind of hell I wouldn't wish my worst enemy: he's now fully a slave to the machine. What started as a sales pitch turned rapidly into a disturbingly transparent exercise in self-loathing
The problem then, as he makes clear, is the collapse of everything else. His own self-worth, for example, he finds gone at the moment it's most important to him. In the post he just sounds a little too honest, which is how engineers usually sound when they're burning out -- no mystery considering the draining relationship he describes having to his work.
This is the same contradiction he cannot address elsewhere: is his talent 1000% leveraged because he is an uber-god programmer? Is he addicted to a powerful and expensive drug? Is his involvement in his work so inconsequential that he could just be playing video games? Is AI sheparding the most valuable work in society because it has unlimited potential? Or are these people just leaderboarding to slurp up a limited pool of value while dunking on the people working to expand the boundaries of what is possible in the human world?
But seriously: as an attorney, I find that this writing perfectly reflects what I imagine it must be like to live inside the head of someone who agentic-vibe-codes for a living. It's all over the map; pulled (and pulling the reader) in a dozen different directions; non-standard; mixing metaphors and idioms; likely 20x longer than it ought to be; and almost able to figure out its own point in the pastiche as it flails around.
I imagine that the coding results of the process described would be similar. Would that be an accurate prediction?
Also, after explaining how society is moving at extraordinary pace, you write a book, and don't even have a link yet? I feel exactly like him though (old) but trying to join the fun.
I've spent a lot of time doing this sort of agentic coding and it's ... not great as your full time Thing.
Much better for it to be auxiliary boost.