Vibe Coding in the 90s
ssg.dev
ssg.dev
Microsoft Quick Basic help was also gold.
Still, you can find an awful lot of solutions there, no question
I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.
I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.
Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.
Learning about heap allocation was euphoric. I kept beaming because I had unlocked infinite memory, and people around me didn't get why I was such a happy teenager.
To be fair, I already knew about memory regions from PEEK/POKEing on a commodore as a child, but it was always static and pre-populated.
This got me.
This was a -great- experience. Inheriting code and not knowing what to do with it and trying to forensically triangulate what is going on and learning to read code in the process: this was the best way to learn. The argument that vibe coding is something like that is maybe one of the more hopeful arguments i've heard about it.
The problem was I couldn't actually understand any of the code. I learned CSS and HTML!
After many trials, I used what I knew and realized well whatever this PHP code is doing, I'm going to put it in a div with style="border:5px solid red" and see what it does that way.
Fast forward 2, 5, 10, 12 years and that's how I learned to be a programmer.
Seeing a lot of programmers being raised in the age of Stack Overflow, there was a ton of web developers who definitly didn't understand the code they copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, and some of them literally had a spray-and-pray approach to programming that makes you question how it worked sometimes when they had almost no understanding of what the code actually did.
But they managed to produce stuff that made webpages do things, so management was happy.
I'm not proud of creating a malevolent tool but am proud of the technical achievement of it considering I just finished high school.
I think the most interesting point in the post is this one:
> I can create anything. Let me just take a look at that CD.
I like the idea of shifting the discussion from "how it is done" to "what are we doing".
Therefore, the point here is that we should do things the CD can't.
In that sense, the package thingy is better than LLMs. It gives you a directory that you can explore and the choice of not wasting time doing things that are already on the CD.
But then, you can say that directory is very large today. So large, we might need an index. And LLMs are just that. But if they're that, then there's some value in finding novel ways to glue things together.
And round and round we go.
It ended up being a missing semicolon in an odd spot and the compiler was just confused.
I remember walking homing thinking, "hey, if I can survive that, maybe I can just hack this CS thing..."
Until then, the emergent behavior of most corporations' incentive structures will be to get away with it in the short term, due to everyone pursuing their bonuses and promotions, while leaving the legal repercussions as someone else's problem.
Plaintiff: "In summary, they clearly copied our product's code."
Judge: "According to all the evidence of how they used your IP, looks like you now own their company."
Defendant: wearing tie-dye shirt, whimpering "But... vibe coding..."
Plaintiff: "Your honor, we're asking them to vacate their office building by the end of the day, since we've scheduled an, ahem, ozone treatment for tomorrow morning."
Defendant: pulls out bong, takes a hit "Can't you feel the vibe, mannn..."
how about developing using WYSIWYG? drag + drop + connect + theme/style + preview.
80/90s -> books -> pass out -> code
2000s -> altavista/tucows then google -> swearing -> code
2010s -> stack overflow -> swearing, hair pulling -> code
2020s -> LLM -> swearing, hair pulling, silent screaming -> code