Imagine you were putting up a skyscraper in Manhattan. I lived in an area of the city, called Billionaire's Row, for nine years where I saw quite a few huge buildings go up from my living room window on the 50th floor. Now imagine you used a different plumbing system in every apartment, over 140 stories, with up to 15 residences per story. Different wiring. All the rooms are different shapes. How could you maintain such a building? I think ChatGPT might be able to do it but no human could. We need patterns to allow us to understand big things. #
Bluesky is having trouble keeping their network running. As a developer I empathize. As a user, it's beginning to be a problem. I am using it the way I used to use Twitter, taking notes for future blog posts, sharing a few linkblog feeds, DMing with people I work with, and want/need to keep going. I know about its lock-in problems, but at this time there's no open alternative that has the same collection of users who are easy enough to find. So if it stays unreliable I have to think about what to do about that. Every time I get a 403 Forbidden, I stop and think if this is the time to write a post? This was the time. #
What you don't hear about AI is that it doesn't know how human minds work, what our limits are, what we can do that they can't. It has no memory. This was hard to believe, but you have to tell it to keep things in some kind of memory, usually a Markdown file, then tell it to read it from another file. These are things humans just do. I may have to say it two or three times, but you will remember it if you're a normal human.#
I know there are places you can leave an instruction to read it when it starts, but sometimes it doesn't do it. It could never, in its current state, figure out how to make a product that people want to use. Nor would a human be able to easily read the code it generates unless you work hard at teaching it how that works, and if you have to do that, you might as well do it yourself. #
It never looks for prior art, in some contexts -- but in others, it's encyclopedic about prior art. You might find a function named returnError in one place that takes a string argument, where most of the other instances take an object that contains a string. How do I, as a human, work in an environment like that? #
The users who vibe code who think they know how to make code people will want to use are making the same mistake student programmers make, they come out of school only having done student projects, which have very limited objectives. The real world is far more demanding. The real world populated by humans that is. Just some random thoughts as I try to create usable code working with Claude.#
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
