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?

@menelion @matt as someone who actually knows how to do this already i'd say it's really just the overwhelming amount of broken that stops me from hand-making everything. The code an AI spits out is generally pretty awful quality-wise, and you do have to run around the watercooler with it a few times now and again, but particularly for static tooling that doesn't change, the speed it creates fixes with is difficult to eat

@zersiax @menelion @matt So much this, and everything out there is piles and piles of complexity which I guess I could learn about if it was actually something I needed regularly but as a one-off it's more a waste of time than anything. I just integrated Android's Activity Recognition API into another project which, from what I remember of my research years back, involves lots of Google Play Services-specific RPC incantations for setting up the connection. Once that's done, I'm not going to need that knowledge again, and while the time I spent learning things for a one-off task is arguably not wasted, it's time I can never get back. That plus the brokenness of everything are probably my biggest struggles, and I can't imagine being new to this and eventually hitting those.

Also, the speed at which Claude takes 2 multi-megabyte log files and constructs abstract shell pipelines to extract just what it needs is dizzying. That's something I gather sighted folks have always been able to do way more quickly by skimming a usually ANSI-color-coded log. Even if its logic and process makes perfect sense to me, I'm not capable of slinging enough awk and sed to point at a log and identify all app-specific activity around crashes or RPC failures between this and that timestamp.

All that is to say, as someone who also knows how to do this, it feels like a larger hill to climb for blind folks because we never really had great accessible tooling for ourselves in the first place. Expecting someone to learn development and eventually grapple with a huge pile of logs or some multi-billion-dollar megacorp's bespoke pile of shit to do a thing feels like a larger ask than ever before.

That said, I don't know where this leaves us. I don't know if it's just a matter of providing one set of specific language tooling, though. Also not a particularly big fan of the solution being bellowing at my tooling several times a day because it wrote War and Peace in the doc comments again...

@fastfinge @menelion @matt @nolan @zersiax so one thing that would be helpful is a straightforward alternative to sed/awk for finding relevant bits of logs and accessible summaries of graphs?

@fastfinge @menelion @matt @nolan @zersiax right and what I'm saying is that the rolling could do a lot better here, you don't get plots without figuring out how to parse logs either, how to summarize information verbally vs visually is a challenge but it's not something (for the tooling, not for an individual, for an individual it's overwhelming)

@fastfinge @menelion @matt @nolan @zersiax yes and since AI gets that feature from being a specific kind of deep learning method I think this might be a good niche for an established machine learning method that a) burns less electricity and b) doesn't make shit up, you just got me thinking a little about which one that would be.