Question for people who vibe-code full apps, especially blind people, as I believe that covers most of my followers who do this: What would it take for you to be comfortable coding directly in a programming language without an LLM? A high-level programming language with better tutorials and quickstart templates than are currently available, particularly for writing real apps? Or do you believe that having an LLM generate the code is the only way you could practically do what you do?
@matt I took programming classes and discovered I get completely lost in the syntax. My brain isn't capable of translating conception into the actual modules and code pieces required, even if I am better than the average person at abstracting - in English - how a system behaves and selecting components that go with it. I genuinely do not believe I will ever be able to properly code.
Replying to @nick@hkc.social
@nick I'll be curious to hear what my followers who are into programming language design and psychology (I do have at least one follower in each of those fields) think of this. To me though, it sounds like we still have room for improvement in programming language design. Not that there's much funding for that, with everyone chasing AI.
@matt @nick I think LLM coding being a thing among otherwise reasonable people (especially blind and/or non-programmers) are a major symptom of how hostile the dev landscape still is.
I don't necessarily think that this is a language problem primarily, rather a development tools issue. All available IDEs are objectively terrible and could be doing a much better job even with the available static analysis.
If I ever get my own PL project off the ground, it'll be IDE first. With built in linting, refactoring and interactive debugging and AST transforms as major features, not afterthoughts. Big if, obviously.
Basically, there's this ridiculous valley between "read a book first, then come up with the whole architecture and type it in by hand" and "point and click in a severely limited saas tool" that it's no wonder anyone who wants some control over what's happening without making it a career reaches for the third option. Terrible as it is, it does deliver what you want, quickly. Denying that there's a huge demand for that kind of software creation has not been doing us any favors.