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Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.
When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.
Very well said.
@aral so true, and not only for code.
singed
i use AI mostly when i can't get my head around something (or there's something missing but i don't know what), which happens like every 2 months or so
several times when i used the AI for asisstance, it threw out some 50 lines of code but there was 1 line which helped me getting past my coding block
@aral Writing music feels much the same way. If I've ever thought I knew exactly what I wanted and stuck doggedly to the vision, the final product was always the worse for it. Follow the muse where it leads you!
@aral How do you deal with design system shenanigans?
I am having a hard time with inconsistent UI elements in my personal portfolio/blog that I am working on, it's annoying me because it is pushing me to either under-engineered mess of a code or over-engineered compartmentalization by referring similar codes from already-existing UI libraries.
Yesterday, I just started with some simple atoms (typography), but it feels like there is a lot of work.
@RecurringBloatware @aral
Did you vibe code it?
@Mik3y @aral Yes, I did. Not the best experience, because the LLM makes assumptions about my skillset. It didn't tell me anything about design system methodolody - I had to research about Atomic Design Methodology myself - which is also used by Penpot - the tool that I am currently using.
I am struggling because, for example, ChakraUI, has heading components. Now, do I make own heading components? How do I decide on variants? This is what is making it so hard for me.
@RecurringBloatware @aral try seeing what you can do without ai. You probably are better than ai. You need to understand the code you work on and when ai does, the work you lose understanding.
@Mik3y @RecurringBloatware Yeah, I’d say invest time in learning the fundamentals. Then you can use them time and time again and regardless of which higher-level abstractions (frameworks, etc.) you end up adopting, should you choose to do so.
@aral and following with your last metaphor, with the vending machine, at least, you know what you got is edible
@flooper Have you actually ever eaten vending machine food? I’d say “edible” is a stretch :) Perhaps “not immediately ruinous.”
@aral But so many times you just want a library to do some specific thing, you don’t care a lot about its implementation, so you add it to your project without looking at the code. Maybe you heard it’s good, you have a look at the download count or the commit history to see if it’s actively maintained, but in the end it’s not critical and it could be replaced without much consideration. In the same way AI-generated code is useful in similar cases.
@alfonsomunozpomer Any library worth adding to your project is written by people who have spent extensive time and effort in the problem domain. It has vigorous tests and is actively maintained. None of that is true for AI-generated code which is more akin to adding the first Node module that comes up in a npm search and hoping for the best. In fact, no, you’d likely still get higher quality code that way due to npm’s default algorithm surfacing higher quality libraries.
@aral I’ve had Copilot write tests for me; other times I wrote the tests myself and have had Copilot write the implementation. I always read and review what it writes. Just yesterday it saved me time by rewriting some documentation, and pasted some DDL and ask it to write a few SQL queries. Granted that none of that is “vibe coding”, but I think AI assistants can be used judiciously and they can be helpful.
@aral Programming is definitely a creative process.
When I do code reviews, I keep my eye out for bits that don't look aesthetically pleasing. This is usually where the bugs lurk.
@gunchleoc @aral Then you would love vibe coding as it just like doing code reviews.
@Kiteros @aral No thank you. I have to do too much of that in my translation job already and that type of correct-looking-but-not-quite-right text is very hard to correct. Machine Translation post-editing jobs are the worst.
Human mistakes have a completely different quality to AI mistakes and are a lot less stressful to deal with.
Also, code reviews are not just about code quality - they are also about mutual learning, thus improving *future* code quality too.
@gunchleoc @aral Yeah, they learn from corrections in coding.
@aral this is the same for any creative process that I’ve been involved in.
@aral thanks for writing this.
@aral This is true no matter what you are working with, be it clay, wood, fiberglas or metal.
@aral Love it!
I've never had this more then with (indie) gamedev! Often start out with an idea but at the end there often not much left of the original idea and has improved so much
Besides, the process is the part where it all comes together but also where one learns the most I think, the part of discovering more or alternative options to one's design for example
If you skip right to the end you'll never walk that road and miss out on a lot, prob the most
@aral This is breaking down, though. The last decade I've noticed developers are less and less interested in understanding their code and working on it. They want to just get something that passes tests and move on to the next thing, and if it breaks in production they'll put that in the queue to fix.
@tknarr What a horrible existence.
@aral Exactly. Even if some hypothetical fancy computer program could generate actual good and working code - I'd still write code myself.