willtemperley

It sounds like you understood what was happening here and used a tool effectively, nice.

That's very different from what a lot of vibe-coders do, like wholesale cloning and relicensing projects. This is happening in the GIS space, and these vibe-clone projects slightly hilariously inherit all the technical debt they didn't understand.

Nothing wrong with using LLMs, but I agree with Andrej Karpathy: "you can outsource your thinking, but not your understanding".

> I think there is a small subset of technical nerd/idealists who think that quality is all that matters

This is just a derogatory comment.

It is exactly this kind of arrogance is killing open source. In my area, GIS, there are foundational projects that are necessarily intricate. For example it might be necessary to make a four-dimensonal transform of a location, that takes into account point movement due to the Glacial Isostatic Adjustment. There are hundreds of other complex examples I could come up with.

This is deep knowledge. The libraries are intricate and quality does matter.

Unfortunately the lynchpin maintainer has just gone on indefinite strike, partly because open-source vibe-coders are wholesale copying and relicensing some of these libraries in their quest to ... do what?

I actually I don't know what they want. Take all the oxygen from the room as far as I can tell.

If you don't understand the code, how can you know if it's good enough?

I guess you could ask the model. "Yes well done, you're a visionary software engineer".

> who really cares about reverse engineering old games?

Tetris copyright for example is still heavily policed.

I think however if games continue to be killed there should be a legal route towards the community taking ownership in whatever way is necessary.

Have you tried “ A a a a a Very Good Song”?

It is 9 minutes of silence so that U2 album you never asked for doesn’t start playing at the most dangerous part of the journey.

I'd be interested if it benchmarked well against iShape-rust, the overlay engine in GeoRust:

https://github.com/ishape-rust/ioverlay

I think this is exactly why the current "attack of the vibe-clones" will fail.

Vibe-coding complex software can work, but it's going to take a really disciplined team to manage this properly, like in this article.

> There is CLEARY dubious shit going on.

There is, but I'm just not sure what the end-game is. I'm seeing this in the GIS space too. It's like these people just want to take all the oxygen from the room, leaving no space for the legit apps built by creative thinkers.

I'm thinking about this right now. I only need a marketing site and I'd love to go back to pure HTML, which the following site believes is a good idea:

https://modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems

> vibe cloned piracy is a demotivating force. It ruins the incentive to create.

I also feel demotivated by these clones. It devalues the legitmate pursuit of building creative apps to compete with the current standards.

> I think that knowing how code (and technical systems) work is going to continue to be valuable and perhaps even more valuable.

I think the art of refactoring will be more valuable than ever.

I'm having an LLM free day today, going through a lot of generated code, de-duplicating and making the abstractions more usable. It's quite enjoyable and improves my understanding of the code significantly.

> Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.

Given sustained exponential growth is mathematically impossible to maintain with fininte resources, it's funny to me they're using advanced mathematics to try and achieve this.

It’s straight-up false advertising and they should be held accountable.

> Everything is safe if you know what you are doing sufficiently.

Exactly. If nothing is risk free then the original statement we’re discussing is untrue.

> it counts as "safe" for practical purposes

So not risk free.

This is just a truism though.

Of course if you don't do something you're never going to be at risk from whichever activity it was.

Some activities always have risk, for example ski-touring (backcountry if you're a Yank). If there's skiable snow, avalanche danger is never zero.

I wonder if people say these things, they actually believe it?

You make some wild generalisations there.

Can you back up your claims?

Have you actually been to Burning Man?

Using an LLM does not require people to stop understanding their codebases, and I find one of the best uses of an LLM is to improve my understanding of my code. I suspect the really good software is going to be written by those doing this, but time will tell.

I'm not angry, but yes I'm being deeply sarcastic to illustrate the extreme case you seem to be advocating, where we relinquish our understanding to the machines.

In a competitive business like software you need an unfair advantage and for very few people that's having near unlimited tokens. Even then I doubt that's going to produce good software.

I think it would be worth it for the sheer education and entertainment value.

Seeing the SR-71 still gives me the same buzz as when I read about it in books as a child 40 years ago. It reminds me how cool technology can be, when it increasingly isn't.

I also think it's pretty cool that arguably the most awesome aircraft in existence didn't have guns (I'm ignoring the YF-12).

Make Technology Cool Again.

> You really believe that alcohol is equivalent to water in its toxicity?

No! At what point did I imply that? Can you please stop trolling.

If you want to discuss, let's go point-by-point. What do you think about TFAs in wine?

https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6304/14/6/454

You are correct of course.

You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.

I'm rather glad I've drawn people's attention to the issue, despite having to endure extremely patronising comments like yours.

Second, I clearly have skin-in-the-game here because you did read the first comment, so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one (well done that was clever in 2015) can go forth and multiply.

I'm not really making any strong claims except that people should look into the chemicals in wine. It's a complicated story. Unfortunately many of the USDA links are dead so this is the best evidence I have for the difference in wine standards in Europe vs the US.

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...

They're making a far stronger counter claim:

> there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.

The labelling standards are a lot stricter in the US:

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...

I told an anecdote for illustrative purposes and made no explicit links. Others have assumed the link however.

My purpose was to draw people's attention to some lesser known aspects of the wine industry which I think are consequential, and I was illustrating I have some insignts into this that people that haven't worked in the industry probbaly don't.

> GP seem to imply it was the other chemicals

I didn't draw any conclusions or make a link, you assumed the link.

Let's look at some evidence instead. There are very high levels of TFA in wine:

https://www.pan-europe.info/press-releases/2025/04/study-rev...

It'll be decades before we know the true effects of the chemicals other than alcohol that are evidently present in wine, but TFA is known to pose serious health risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoroacetic_acid

I find there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in people who are partial to a bottle or two, they tend to hang on to the myths that it's good for them.

The point is the chemical levels in the wine. The anecdote about my father is just that. Please don’t trivialise that just to point score, it’s bad taste.

I used the anecdote to illustrate I have some experience in the wine industry, having worked hands on for a few years. My father studied chemistry at Cambridge so his understanding of wine chemistry is, or was, expert level.

I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry?

I'm not surprised.

There's untold levels of chemicals in wine. Organic wine is BS in Europe, organic vineyards actually use more chemicals like giant quantities of copper sulphate. The US is actually a lot better than Europe in this regard.

Source: My father owned a vineyard in France before he keeled over with a subarachnoid haematoma after drinking 3 glasses of Rose at lunchtime.

The latency is a bit higher, but IP over Avian Carrier would be cheaper than this.

> Another thing to think about is, what would it take for you to care less about the understanding

Yes please, I'd like to not understand my codebase, give up my decades of experience and have a machine do everything for me. That way I can let captialism utterly steamroller me because of my paltry token stack, in comparison to the 19 year old vibe coder who has secured a new funding round for ponzi.ai