Ape Coding [fiction]
rsaksida.com
rsaksida.com
I also have two levels "beneath" vibe coding:
- Power Coding: Like power armor, you describe chunks of code in English and it's built. Here you outsource syntax and stdlib, but remain in control of architecture and data flow.
- Backseat Coding: Like vibe coding but you keep peeking at the code and complaining ;)
- Vibe Coding: Total yolo mode. What's a code?
No Internet connection, no cache of ecosystem packages, no digitized searchable reference docs; you sit in a room with a computer and a bookshelf of printed SDK manuals, and you make it work. I.e. the 1970s IBM mainframe coding experience!
Not necessarily more efficient, but it feels healthier and more rewarding.
It's an interesting question: Will coding turn out to be more like landscaping, where (referring to the practice specifically of cutting grass) no one uses hand tools (to a first approximation)? Or it will it be more like woodworking, where everyone at least knows where a Stanley hand plane is in their work shop?
Humor aside, long-handed programming is losing its ability to compete in an open market. Automate or be left behind. This will become increasingly true of many fields, not just software.
Used to be at most once.
“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.
“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.
“You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”
Make a fictitious subject with all the traits of the person you really want to attack (Subject X). Have your social media bots attack Subject X. Anger spillover on social media will begin attacking your true target by trait association. The real target will have a difficult to impossible time coming at you via legal channels as there is no direct association.
Wall-E seems like it’s getting closer to reality every day
The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.
We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require dozens of pages of natural language to describe the same thing.
Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.
The skills we needed before are just no longer as relevant. It doesn't mean the world will get dumber, it will adapt to the new tooling and paradigm that we're in. There are always people who don't like the big paradigm change, who are convinced it's the end of the "right" way to do things, but they always age terribly.
I find I learn an incredible amount from using AI + coding agents. It's a _different_ experience, and I would argue a much more efficient one to understand your craft.
Using AI as just a generator is really missing out on a lot.
LLMs are able to ingest numbers. And not just Arabic numerals; Did you know that there are other kinds of number systems?
Believe it or not, they also ingest multimedia. You don't need the English language to talk to a language model. Anything can be a language; you can communicate using only images.
And for that matter, modern LLMs are great at abstract math (and like anything else the results still need proofreading).
I always use the calculator.
But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball park.
Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist, and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I catch it early I just re-run the equation but there is a special button where I can tell it that it used a digit that does not actually exist.
Sometimes, for complex ones, it tells me it's trying to calculate and provides some details about how it's going about it and keeps going and going and going, for those ones I just reboot the calculator.
Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of the corporate-state.
Not to forget, the calculator consumes so much processing power that most people are unable to run it at home, so you need a subscription service to access general-purpose calculation.
In do or die situations we actually use 3 calculators.
Strongly suspect this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, I applaud your... gusto? Or whatever it is you have going on here.
No. We have programming languages because reading and writing binary/hexadecimal is extremely painful to nigh on impossible for humans. And over the years we got better and better languages, from Assembly to C to Python, etc. Natural language was always the implicit ultimate goal of creating programming languages, and each step toward it was primarily hindered by the need to ensure correctness. We still aren't quite there yet, but this is pretty close.
Natural language is natural because it's good for communicating with fellow humans. We have ways to express needs, wants, feelings, doubts, ideas etc. It is not at all "natural" to program a computer with the same language because those computers were not part of the development of the language.
Now, if we actually could develop a real natural language for programming that would be interesting. However, currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development. The development of the language is expected to have been done already prior to training.
Invented languages and codes are used everywhere. Chemical nomenclature, tyre sizes, mathematics. We could try to do that stuff in "natural" language, but it would be considered a serious regression. We develop these things because they empower us to think in ways that aren't "natural" and free our minds to focus on the problem at hand.
> currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development
It's quite literally what LLMs are trained on. You create the core architecture, and then throw terabytes of human-generated text at it until a model that works with said text results. Doesn't matter if it participates in language development or not, it only matters that humans can communicate with it "naturally".
> Invented languages and codes
All languages are invented; the only difference is how conscious and deliberate the process was, which is a function of intended purpose. Just look at Esperanto. Or Valyrian.
For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs, but this doesn't exist in the language, so why would it exist in the LLM models? It will never exist, unless we invent it, which is, of course, exactly what programming languages are.
Natural languages are not invented. Written scripts are said to be invented, but nobody says a natural language like English or French is invented. It just happened, naturally, as the name suggests.
If natural language were the end goal then mathematics and music would use it too. There's nothing stopping them.
We really don't. Eventually we won't even be programming anymore per se. Consider communicating with someone who isn't fluent in any language you know, and vice versa. In the beginning you need to use a pretty restricted vocabulary set so you understand each other, similar to a programming language. But over time as communication continues, that vocabulary set grows and things become increasingly "natural", and it's easier for you to "program" each other.
Same with LLMs. We just need to get to the point where a model has sufficient user context (as it already has all the vocabulary) for effective communication. Like OpenClaw is currently accessing enough context for enough use cases that its popularity is through the roof. Tell it to do something, and as long as it has access to the relevant tools and services, it just gets it done. All naturally.
That reminds me of an argument on here a while back: where I said I wished Spotify let you filter tracks by presence of pitch-correction or autotune. This wasn't because I thought autotune was 'bad' or modern artists were 'fake', but because sometimes I wanted to listen to vocals as a raw performance - intonation, stability, phrasing - I wanted the option of listening to recordings that let me appreciate the _skill_ possessed by the artists that recorded them.
I got _absolutely destroyed_ in that comments section, with people insisting i'm a snob, that I'm disrespectful, bigoted towards modern artists, there's no way i can actually hear the difference, and if i cant why does it even matter, and anyway everyone uses it now because studio time is expensive and it's so much cheaper than trying to get that perfect take. People got so angry, I got a couple of DMs on Twitter even. All the while I struggled to articulate or justify why I personally value the _skill_ of exceptional raw vocal performance - what I considered to be performance "with feeling".
But, I had to come to terms with the fact that anyone can sing now - no-one can tell the difference, so the skill generally isn't valued any more. Oh, you spent your entire life learning to sing? You studied it? Because you loved music? Sorry dude, I dunno what to say. I guess you'll have to find another way to stand out. You could try losing some weight. Maybe show some skin.
I always found it pretty remarkable in David Copperfield when Dickens recounts regular walks between London and Canterbury, which he apparently did make in real life
You're right, "ape-walking" is a rare thing, only a small group of people are motivated enough to walk that distance - for religious, athletic, or recreational purpose. I think this does apply to "ape-coding", it's going to be a niche interest for much fewer people than today.
That's not the reason to do ape coding. AI generated code is not innovative. If you want to build something that no one has built anything similar to then you have to ape code.
See Chris Lattner's blog where he explains the limitations of AI: https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.
(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
Ape coding sounds harsher and more insulting, implying mindless or sloppy work rather than humor.
You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. We don't say "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the entire concept fades to the back.
Some still do. Os and compiler devs to name a few
Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and tools have limits.
Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical “key frame” sections by hand keep it on track.
People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code clearly work on very different problems than I do.
If you look at the per capita number of people talking about assembly when looking at all the people on the planet it's highly likely there are more people looking at assembly now then whenever your back then was. Programmers simply where a tiny part of the population back then.
Each time we make coding easier and more high level we invite more programmers into the total pool.
I know it's not what the thought piece is about, but it's equally accurate to say engineers are "aping in" on AI coding without doing any research. Very much the same vibe, my anti-AI friends suddenly flipped their tune to shill slopped together apps.
I expect it to go about as well as it did in crypto.
See also: https://longestjokeintheworld.com/
It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.
The term was popularized when asking a computer to do it for you became the dominant form of cognition. "Ape thinking" first appeared in online communities as derogatory slang, referring to humans who were unable to outsource all their thinking to a computer. Despite the quick spread of asking a computer to do it for you, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human complacency were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology.
They will have very narrow to zero understanding — don't need it to fix — of shear forces, navier stokes.
They will command high rates if labor is limited(a plumber in Indonesia will commande lower ppp adjusted hourly rates than America). CS education become a subset of applied math since graduate hiring of code-plumber will require a narrower certificate to fix an AI system — which works very much like how plumber working to fix a building leak is different from a person fixing a water pipe burst under a road.
A few AI systems will become dominant, That should be a mix of Anthropics and your Googles. They will hire code plumbers to plumb together all the things they provide.
You don't have to use much brain at all as a code-plumber. You become a remote journeyman logging in and plumbing with given tools, making sure there is low back pressure(a term where load on future plumbers interacting/fixing with ai decreases) and the like.
I really like to understand the practice of software engineering by analogy to research mathematics (like, no one ever asks mathematicians to estimate how long it will take to prove something…).
Something I think software engineers can take from math right now: years of everyone’s math education is spent doing things that computers have always been able to do trivially—arithmetic, solving simple equations, writing proofs that would just be `simp` in Lean—and no one wrings their hands over it. It’s an accepted part of the learning process.
When the user needs a change made, would they prefer I spend another two weeks extending my perfect program, or throw a few LLMs at their sloppy code and have it done in a day?
In some cases it might be better to have some crap right away and more cheaply, but even you would probably not like a 20% failure rate in most of the software you use.
This is really basic decision-theory stuff, often the cost of an error is far greater than the benefit of correctness.
Or to put this a different way, they won't be developing a whole cloth custom OS but more like customizing a linux kernel to do what they want. The reason is there is some minimum of problem space exploration required, hence entropy generation needed, to understand the interactions of the hardware and it's limitations.
Hence if you wanted to run this 10,000,000X faster computer in the future to do what you are saying, it would explode like a supernova with the energy concentration required to do it quickly.
TL;DR it's a few trillion times more energy efficient not to do this.
In that picture, aping is probably a step up from stochastic parroting.
Is it sci-fi like writing from the perspective of a future person?
It sounds like someone trying to make assumption sounds as fact. Not a fan.
Maybe the LLMs today are deeply flawed and cannot replace programmers. But, one day, LLMs (or some other AI approach) _will_ be successful in replacing programmers. It might not be this year or the year after.
I do however feel pretty confident in saying that there will be few programmers in 2076. This piece will look quite prescient.
It's just like how we say "can you imagine programming on a punchcard?"
It should be flagged and taken down.
Blaming lack of adoption purely on regressive factors follows the same frame that AI firms set. It isn't very effective satire for that reason.
It couldn't be that there is something essential and elementary that is wrong with the output, no... all these experienced experts are just troglodites and wrong and we should instead tag along with the people who offloaded the parts of their work they found tough to a machine the first chance they got.
There's no such thing as ape coding. There's still just coding, and vibe coding.
Only an idiot would read the piece in that way.
>It should be flagged and taken down.
Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?
> how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?
Posts that are likely to result in flames generally are.
Considering, how some modern attitude works for certain people, and how much power of trends and socials may offer, such terms get boosted over... and you just hope and keep believing in people...
Related: https://medium.com/@nathanladuke/b56da64a09ee (To Those Who Comment Their Opinion Without Reading the Whole Story... I was shocked at how many people simply read the title and then posted their opinion on the whole article...)
Seems like it's a doubly offensive term.
Are there better terms, less encumbered by bigotry, while still covering the "meat space" quality to this development approach?