We got our microwave out of the kitchen.

Saw this post about "CSS Gardening," and I'm reminded of debugging my first responsive website. Did anyone else spend hours wrestling with margins and padding, only to realize it was a typo in the media query? I did! Now I meticulously check my syntax.

But isn't that what we want? Would you prefer that e.g. bridges used custom hand-crafted screws in weird diameters instead of standardized, cheap, proven off-the-shelf parts? Everyone doing their own non-standard thing is e.g. why international train travel in Europe sucks. There's 6 different voltage/frequency combinations for high-level rail in Europe alone and dozens more for local systems. There's more than 20 incompatible train control systems as well. Running an international train service might require changing locomotives on every border crossing, because of garbage like that. Standardization is a good thing.

I tried vibe coding with Copilot Agent mode the other day just for fun. I needed a small web UI (two forms, a handful of buttons, single page, no backend) for a hobby project. The UI was just for a non-critical part of the project. It won't see a lot of modifications, it was made from scratch, so basically the perfect circumstances for easy coding. I'm a backend/embedded developer and while I can find my way around FE code, I don't know anything about which framework is currently hype and I didn't really want to get into learning all that for just a very simple little hobby tool. Vibe coding kinda mostly worked. It did create the app I wanted with comparatively small amounts of manual coding. It did help with my lack of framework knowledge But that's where the positives end. It made mistakes all the time resulting in syntax errors, which it reckognized itself and asked if it should fix them, and when I said it should, it just made many, many more syntax errors. So at that point I had to stop using it, fix the errors manually and only then return to vibe coding. One issue I had all the time was that it would put correct lines in the wrong locations. For example, a change should add a line to a list (among other things). It did generate the correct line but put it 100 lines later right in the middle of some function code. The most annoying instances of that were that it insisted on putting each new function on line 1 before the import statements and outside of all components. The produced code was horrible. Like, comically bad. All in one 1500k lines file, duplicate and dead code everywhere, no clear code standard, every function looks like it was stolen from a different project. It implemented a few things that I didn't ask it for, and when I asked it to remove it, it only removed the feature from the DOM, leaving all supporting functions and variables intact (thus producing dead code). I had to do some manual touch-ups for things it couldn't do, and it was really difficult to do sue thanks to the spaghetti-origins of the code. If this was a real product that was to be maintained for a longer period of time this would be horrendous to maintain.

lol. Meanwhile record numbers of tech grads are working non-tech jobs.

So. wait. Llamas are slightly-human horses?

good reason to take a day out, will tell it to my boss.

True on both fronts. Sea and programming level. (Low/high etc) Heh.

Yeah I mean it's definitely possible to write a mostly sensible string-number equality function that only breaks in edge-cases, but at this point it's all kinda vibes-based mush, and the real question is like... Why would you want to do that? What are you really trying to achieve? The most likely case is that it's a novice that doesn't understand what they're doing and the Python setup you describe does a better job at setting up guardrails. I don't really see the connection to concatenation, that's kind of its own thing.

It might need to be a rather hot river then.

I use Unreal Engine right now, but I've also used Godot and Unity in the past. I dont use Unity anymore, and probably won't ever bcz of some shenanigans they've pulled in the recent past. Also used pygame, and way back before I discovered game engines I tried using OpenGL and SDL directly. (Do not recommend going that route) They are way too low level for you to make any real progress, at least in a timely manner. They are what you'd want to use if you are trying to write your own game engine, but most people aren't trying to do that. Most people just want to make games.

Resisting the urge to reinvent the wheel to run myself over with it

Glorious! I'm in DevOps right now and that was uncannily accurate :,D

AI will not take over. OpenAI on the other hand...

Not quite telling. We have customers from various countries.

Them damn children.

As always AI is ok for doing tiny little things with no dependencies and no plan to use/maintain the thing for a long time. Basically a functional prototype. Beyond that it's useless. As you said, more spaghetti than in an italian restaurant. Oh, and never ask an AI to fix the bugs it made. It always fails with that.

it has lichs

Considering how LLMs work, you might be one of them.