So to the extent we want people to push the frontier of video games, people ought to not program in assembly, even though this means game engines will write messy assembly and people will be worse at assembly.
As a firm believer in the value of knowing Assembly, who always overperformed in and enjoyed the low-level programming language and systems courses back in college, I don’t necessarily think that switching over to compiled languages is responsible for the massive decline in optimization that we’ve seen from the software industry. There are plenty of great compiler programmers making sure that good code in C becomes good code in Assembly. I think the causes for that decline are sociological and human in nature, not technical—the proportion of programmers who are passionate about the field has steadily declined as CS became known as “the future” by everyone who didn’t know what they wanted to do for a living.
I would expect that this is also true for ‘vibe coding’. Programmers who care about their work will still do good work, but they’ll be diluted in the wider culture by people who can now produce lots of code but neither understand nor care about the notion of “good code”. It’s a matter of opinion whether the growth in accessibility is a worthwhile tradeoff for this culture shift, but the same discussion has been had about academia, the internet, and countless other things.
Insofar as the technical side goes, I’ve tried to keep fairly up-to-date on LLM coding progress, and I think that fully-automated refactoring of existing codebases, under normal circumstances, is something that we’ll see fairly soon. I’d expect that to solve the problem of giant, impossible-to-navigate slop repositories.
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At the end of the day, I think that the other side of the problem—of new programmers not learning how to code—is a product of different sampling. Most of the slop programmers today would not have learned to code back in 1990. This is not to say that vibe coding hasn’t cost us something valuable—some share of the people that would’ve been good programmers in 1990, within a more passionate and principled culture, are rudderless without that culture to guide them, and this happens whenever a culture is diluted. The Eternal September is a mournful subject for a reason, after all.
As a firm believer in the value of knowing Assembly, who always overperformed in and enjoyed the low-level programming language and systems courses back in college, I don’t necessarily think that switching over to compiled languages is responsible for the massive decline in optimization that we’ve seen from the software industry. There are plenty of great compiler programmers making sure that good code in C becomes good code in Assembly. I think the causes for that decline are sociological and human in nature, not technical—the proportion of programmers who are passionate about the field has steadily declined as CS became known as “the future” by everyone who didn’t know what they wanted to do for a living.
I would expect that this is also true for ‘vibe coding’. Programmers who care about their work will still do good work, but they’ll be diluted in the wider culture by people who can now produce lots of code but neither understand nor care about the notion of “good code”. It’s a matter of opinion whether the growth in accessibility is a worthwhile tradeoff for this culture shift, but the same discussion has been had about academia, the internet, and countless other things.
Insofar as the technical side goes, I’ve tried to keep fairly up-to-date on LLM coding progress, and I think that fully-automated refactoring of existing codebases, under normal circumstances, is something that we’ll see fairly soon. I’d expect that to solve the problem of giant, impossible-to-navigate slop repositories.
--
At the end of the day, I think that the other side of the problem—of new programmers not learning how to code—is a product of different sampling. Most of the slop programmers today would not have learned to code back in 1990. This is not to say that vibe coding hasn’t cost us something valuable—some share of the people that would’ve been good programmers in 1990, within a more passionate and principled culture, are rudderless without that culture to guide them, and this happens whenever a culture is diluted. The Eternal September is a mournful subject for a reason, after all.