25 Years
trenchant.org · by adam mathes · archive · rss
The first trenchant daily entry was 25 years ago today.
Which means I’m old. This site is old. If you’re reading this – you’re probably old. That’s ok.
Since I’m old and have been futzing with computers on the web for at least 25 years I have thoughts about AI to share.
Audience audibly groans.
No, don’t worry! It’ll be fun. Maybe.
A new experience
Like many people, I’ve recently been on a journey into an unnatural world of code generation at superhuman speeds with AI assistants. Our tiny human brains sort of can’t handle it.
Some of the hardest parts of software development are coordination costs and inherent complexity, but usually those parts were sort of spread out in time and space. AI says, what if we hyper-compressed them down to a super-dense ball and threw it directly into your brain all at once?
At some point there will be a name for this hard to describe experience many are having now and trying to make sense of. Or maybe AI vampirism sticks. (But that seems overly negative.)
Actually Decades of Experience
To catch you up – and those of you who are able to ignore this I truly envy you – there’s a lot of stuff going on with AI, but what I’m talking is called “vibe coding” but that is a polarizing term now.
Rather than carefully writing source code, you write natural language and then sit back, wait, let the code generate, compile, run, write tests, fix bugs without you.
And then you might think, ok, but now I need read the source code to make sure it’s good? Nope!
You sort of wave your arms around and gesticulate and give some more natural language direction and it sort of evolves towards what you want, maybe, if you can herd the cats.
It turns out I’ve been vibe coding for over twenty years.
But in 2005 we just called it product management.
Disruption is dizzying
I got a degree in computer science. That’s what I was doing 25 years ago when this site started.
I understand what it’s like to struggle with getting a computer to do what you want, and now, somehow, the future has arrived where robots can type for us super fast and make software out of natural language magic spell text. Except when it doesn’t work. But it mostly does work, sometimes. It’s surprising.
Bespoke software
it’s cool being able to code things because i can be like “i really want this thing that nobody cares about to exist” and then it does exist
Personal software projects are not something I have much time for anymore, but I’ve always enjoyed making little stuff. But what if the costs of writing code drop to zero?
A looong time ago, I wrote an RSS reader. Then I rewrote it at some point. It was basically just for myself, because I wanted it to work a very specific way.
It’s sort of terrible but it worked the way I wanted it to. I decided to try and get AI to improve it for me the past couple days. It got kind of out of hand quickly.
“133 files have changed and there have been 20,368 additions and 1,353 deletions.”
– https://github.com/adammathes/neko
That code and software is bad, you probably shouldn’t use it. It’s an experiment, I guess.
The point is, that is… not a reasonable amount of code for me to keep in my head over a few days. Or even direct effectively. But it’s cool to have AI do things I’d never do! Like write tests.
Or write an entirely new javascript frontend in React, only for me to complain that it’s slow, make AI benchmark it, throw it out entirely and write an entirely new frontend in plain vanilla javascript. Or write a real Makefile.
I keep thinking if I get the tests right I can just whisper to the AI and it will make changes without breaking everything. And it does stuff… but often breaks things.
If you look closely at the commits, you can almost hear me gently explaining to the AI that the whole point of this project is infinite scroll mark to read and keyboard shortcuts, it’s literally right there in the README. But also please don’t look at the commits.
A Software Engineer In Every Pocket
Did you know you can use Claude Code on your phone?
If you know that, you also probably know you shouldn’t do that.
But you can!
You can just sort of scribble into a phone and ghosts of programmers past on computers in data centers in places I’ll never see expand that scribble into source code, binaries, tests, performance analysis, css themes vaguely based on Brinkhurt’s typography, or an endless rail shooter spiritual sequel to Rez.
Vibe coding feels like a strange new designer drug – with superpowers but side effects, highs and lows, withdrawls, falling asleep at weird times and normal people looking at you funny when you talk about it.
Disruption Feels Disruptive
I love my job in software, but software is going to change. How it’s made, our relationship to it. Probably in ways we don’t really understand yet, and probably at a pace most aren’t able to predict effectively.
Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.
– The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived, Paul Ford
When I started this site 25 years ago, it was with a huge amount of joy and love for the internet, web, computers, and technology. That didn’t always come through, but why else would I stay up and learn UNIX and C and HTML and whatever else?
But we didn’t really understand what the web would be 25 years ago. It change and disrupted things, I’d say mostly for good but also plenty of not as good, and in ways that may seem obvious in retrospect but certainly weren’t obvious to everyone at the time.
Being skeptical and concerned is probably the right and natural reaction to these things. Also decided to play Terminator: Resistance just to be safe. But I feel a lot of that excitement and potential from those days now as I stay up late playing with these new weird toys I don’t quite understand.
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