I understand the sentiment. I do think it's important to experience it for yourself - not to convince you (I'm less and less convinced as the months go by) - but just to understand the visceral feeling that leads people into AI psychosis.

At times it feels literally magical. But more and more I feel like my brain has slumped onto the couch, lazily barking at a butler to do my bidding. Like a weird kind of professional brainrot.

I read about a guy who was doing a documentary about crack addicts. They told him he needed to try it once to understand. He did. He then got addicted, lost everything and spent years on the street. Years later he finally got sober and finished the documentary.

> But more and more I feel like my brain has slumped onto the couch, lazily > barking at a butler to do my bidding. Like a weird kind of professional brainrot.

One metaphor could be a car. You have to motivate yourself to get out and walk now, since a car can take you almost everywhere.

Like the people who circle the parking lot trying to get the parking space closest to the store entrance, you can live your life around the "convenience" and not see the problems with what you're doing. Or you can be the person who intentionally parks far away from the entrance so you get a few more steps in. Or the person who cycles to the store. Many metaphors murdered malignantly.

But since this is mental rather than physical, we might end up being couch potatoes like you said, flipping through channels rather than reading, or doing a hobby. (is "doing" a hobby correct? It sounds like "doing a business")

> One metaphor could be a car. You have to motivate yourself to get out and walk now, since a car can take you almost everywhere.

I get where you're coming from, but this metaphor doesn't really land for me. I find driving to be far more stressful than walking, and therefore higher friction than walking.

But your point still stands.

>Of course it is. The AI coded apps only (debatably) work as end-user apps. They are thin little bumps on top of the software mountain. So much, including all the AI tools, depends on efficient, perfectly deterministic tooling.

Most of that is also written via AI these days... Even the Linux kernel got that bug.

and we'll see how that plays out. The way I loom at the chains of "AI" adds feature and feature needs 5 extra PRs over a year to fix it, I think this will be fun!

> The whole thing would come crashing down if everyone embraced vibe coding at every level.

I think this is an interesting hypothesis and want to see what happens.

"rock solid, snappy apps"

Where were those apps even before AI came along? Every piece of software I use in my day across Windows and iOS is a slow, laggy, piece of resource hogging garbage, and that was true long before AI came along. I'm not convinced that AI makes this worse, it might make it much better.

We used to have them—in the 2000s and before. These days not so much, but there appears to be a correlation between the push to use LLMs and a hockey stick in the enshittification curve.

i used a ton of good apps on windows xp and 7 (sumatrapdf, codeblocks, notepad++,…), macos (things, bear.app, cleanshot,…) and Linux. But that was a bit before SaaS and their electron clients. Now I still maintain a lean desktop, but it’s mostly standalone software with no reliance on the “cloud”.

Same. That is why I am over in a corner happily coding away with Common Lisp and McCLIM to write myself an editor that mixes ACME UI with Lisp. Is it ultra-polished? Hell no. But it definitely keeps me sane and I know what I wrote.

Nice, Acme is underrated and needs more experimentation/adaptation as a concept.

Only on the UI part though. I wanted a Genera/CLIM approach, so having that filesystem thing sitting there felt wrong. But I did like the “all UI is text” approach. And with CLIM presentations it can go very far.