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Ouchy. That isn't as bad as the slop I've seen: one example I saw a few weeks ago from vibe-coded software had this absolutely mind-blowing bit of Rust code:

pub(crate) fn zeroed_safe<T>() -> T { unsafe { std::mem::zeroed() } }

pub(crate) fn read_unaligned_safe<T: Copy>(src: const T) -> T { unsafe { std::ptr::read_unaligned(src) } }

pub(crate) fn box_from_raw_safe<T>(ptr: mut T) -> Box<T> { unsafe { Box::from_raw(ptr) } }

pub(crate) fn isize_to_wndproc_safe(value: isize) -> WNDPROC { unsafe { Some(std::mem::transmute::< isize, unsafe extern "system" fn(HWND, u32, WPARAM, LPARAM) -> LRESULT, >(value)) } }

No, I'm not joking either, this is actual code that Claude wrote (and I'm pretty sure it's the latest models too but I don't actually know for certain, since the "dev" never specified). This idiom is repeated about 238 more times through that one file. I have tried repeatedly to help this person out but they're the kind of vibe-coder who thinks they know best, and who will take your advice and drop it into CLAUDE.md verbatim, and then Claude will go off and do the most literal interpretation of that text and not best practice.

To be clear, I don't hate LLMs. They're really useful for very specific things or where you know the domain very well. But then I see slop like this (and the dependency many people have on them -- I have literally heard my own close acquaintances say that they could not see themselves without a Claude subscription) and it really hammers home that software quality is not at all going to get better because of these things unless something changes.

Edit: grammar/spelling

Not really about the content of the blog post but am I the only one bothered by the complete lack of capitalization? Granted it may be because of my screen reader but my TTS engine of choice doesn't pause on un-capitalized words/sentences/phrases/etc. which follow a full stop, so this post unless I read it line by line (minus the code) just blends into complete noise.

This is interesting but what I would love to see is Mac M4/M5 performance (speed) on an Intel laptop CPU. I know that it will be really difficult to pull off (assuming it's achievable at all) given that Intel just makes the CPU and the computer manufacturers for PCs don't do the kind of tuning that Apple is able to do, but still, I can't help but hope that maybe it can be done somehow. Maybe even while making the machines still serviceable! (Yes yes, I know, but a man can dream...)

> Oh. So, because I said I work in software you assumed I worked in safety critical systems?

No, I didn't. I asked you to provide me an example of code that you had generated via AI that might survive in such an environment. But if you re-read my original post, I also gave you an escape hatch: just code that was correct. Not even formally.

I'd say your refusal to provide any examples of your original claim is pretty telling, and your reasoning is pretty convenient for you, now isn't it?

Edit: also, I'd like to point out that it was you who used the word "software" as a general claim. You never specified what kind of software. Since you continue to expect me to derive the proof for you instead of you providing the evidence, I don't see any need to continue this discussion since nobody is obviously going to learn anything. I'm sure many of us here would love to learn what secret sauce your using that makes software engineering so trivial, but you don't seem willing to actually provide that.

Sorry, but we aren't talking about me here. You were the one who made the claim that AI pretty much makes making software trivial nowadays. Specifically, you wrote:

> Making software is no longer very hard. It's becoming a few steps up from burger flipping. Maybe somewhere around line chef.

You did acknowledge that "some" skill was required:

> There's still some skill involved, but the skill is mostly in manual testing, and accurately phrasing what went wrong. The AI is better at debugging than people are, and the code isn't great, but perfectly adequate for pretty much everything. And it's even fine at system design these days.

All I asked was for you to back this up, since the burden of proof is on you to prove your claim, not on me to prove it for you.

Interesting take. Can you link us to your (correct, maybe even formally correct) AI-generated software? Given how general this post is, I assume you wouldn't mind if I extend this to, Idk, aviation or spaceflight, so mind linking to any GH repos you have where you've written code to work in environments like that? I ask because all you said was "making software" and didn't say what kind of "software" we're talking about.

And if you believe that blocking bots is bad, then by all means provide a better alternative that doesn't increase costs for sysadmins. If you believe that the website should just be improved, then by all means feel free to provide instructions on what should be improved and exactly how so that we don't ever have to block bots anymore. I'm sure all the sysadmins having to deal with issues like this one will thank you

Sure, but I would be incredibly shocked if the courts overturned these conclusions. These kinds of determinations are within the remit of the USCO, so a court does not need to come out and say it if the USCO has already done so. Obviously, as I said it would be better if congress weighed in and solved this problem, given that the USCO is free to publish a new NOI to change it's practices/policies, but we all know that congress is too gridlocked atm for that to happen

This is not necessarily true. While no court has explicitly come out and said that copyright does not apply to AI-generated works of authorship, the US copyright office has[0]:

> Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations: > • Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change. > • The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output. > • Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material. > • Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements. > • Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. > • Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control. > • Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs. > • The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI-generated content. > The Office will continue to monitor technological and legal developments to determine whether any of these conclusions should be revisited. It will also provide ongoing assistance to the public, including through additional registration guidance and an update to the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices.

Congress or the courts could, of course, override the stance of the copyright office, but I think it would be highly unusual for them to do so (particularly for something like this). It would however be a lot better if congress just stepped in and said no outright, but until then this will have to do.

[0]: https://www.copyright.gov/ai

> Let's take world leaders as an example. Suppose one starts making up everything they say on the spot, never researches or cares about facts, and just says things people like.

Uh... Don't they already do this?

For me it's the opposite: I don't have $200 plus to throw at Anthropic every Month, and when I do get to use Fable it rips through my usage credits like there's absolutely no tomorrow.

Of course, the hilarious thing to me is that Anthropic likes to claim that the usage limits are because of resource allocation problems or something like that. Obviously no such issue exists, otherwise they wouldn't allow you to bypass it by just paying a bit more and it would be a hard limit. So usage credits are entirely their way of just screwing you out of more money.

I mean. This is what happens with vibe-coded projects. When there's no actual software engineering going on, I wouldn't expect anything better than this.

I don't use Claude code, just Claude web, and I get this all the time. Or (since I have it push me to actually think) it will ask me some question in our back-and-forth, and then right after it'll provide the answer. As a "hint". Like come on

I would look at osxcross[0] if you haven't looked into it already. It can at least do the "build stuff targeting macos" part (well, relatively speaking). Swift support kinda breaks down, unfortunately, and actually getting it set up is a bit of a hassle. but it does work.

[0]: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

> The deterministic script is probably overly complex and hard to read, maybe supports ten billion platform combinations.

Uh sorry what? Can you point to a PKGBUILD that is indeed this complex?

I did also say optimize as well as. As in: your compiler needs to be genuinely better than GCC to compete with it. Good Windows support is a start, but you have yet to reach architecture equality of what GCC provides (which is fair I suppose) and you shell out to GCC for linking (which is pretty funny given that you claim GCC is being left behind...). Although "being left behind" is so nebulous as to be meaningless. For example does your compiler autovectorize? It doesn't look at a glance like it supports OpenMP or OpenACC either.

Prove it and that your compiler is fully C compliant and can handle all possible inputs GCC can accept (and optimize as well as GCC), then we'll talk. Only then will your compiler risk leaving GCC behind.

To be clear, that case did not decide copyrightability of APIs, just fair use in Google's specific circumstances. I wish the court had ruled that APIs themselves could not be copyrightable (after all, they are declarations of something, not the implementation) but it did what it loves to do and kicked the can down the road

Yep, same for those LLM creators who get all pissy when you provide (constructive) criticism about what they've outputted (or ask reasonable questions like if the person is doing actual tests) and they get all offended and call you ungrateful. This happened to me with the author of a Godot GDExtension: I'm (pretty sure) the dev was vibe-coding it, so after like 4-5 releases of it not loading in the editor at all due to what I would consider basic mistakes, I bluntly asked them if they were actually testing their code and got told I was ungrateful and being rude and disrespectful and all that even though what I was asking was very reasonable (after all, the dev had repeatedly released versions that wouldn't even load in the editor).

Agreed. And DuckDB certainly has a very nice API. But I wouldn't use it for a general dataset (think document storage).

Sure, but this is what I'm getting at. :) SQLite is a general-purpose engine that is absolutely amazing at what it does and where it's used (and in many cases even where it isn't appropriate). But TFA was about comparing the two which just doesn't work because one is hand-tuned for a specific use-case while the other is not.

Yes? They certainly act like they are...

How are these two DB engines even comparable other than at the edges? They handle two completely separate workload types: one is more a general-purpose DB engine and the other is specifically for columnar datasets, analytics and the like -- of course a hand-tuned DB engine is going to destroy SQLite on any reasonable benchmark: SQLite wouldn't be optimized for that hand-tuned use-case whereas something like DuckDB is.

No, because AI safety standards are, I think, context-specific. We could for example say that "no development of nuclear weapons" should be one, but then you need all of these exceptions for genuine research. You can't encode laws as "safety standards" without making each model country-specific or similar.

As I noted, I don't have a solution to this problem, and I honestly don't know if there is one. This may be one of those social/non-technical problems because a universal safety standard is simply unachievable and depends on two many external variables.

Agreed, I'd prefer it stick around for the long-term because I use it when creating temporary venvs to screw around with things that I'm not certain about committing to in my actual projects for example. I guess I could do that with scripts but it's nicer/easier to use uv pip

Might get downvoted but was thinking this exact thing when reading this debate. Rustations have this very bad habit (IMO) of pushing the "my language is better than yours" to an extreme that I haven't seen elsewhere (but I don't frequent a huge number of language circles so...). Yet when it is done to them they get all upset about it.

Not to mention: what are the "safety" standards we should enforce? And how should those standards even be enforced?

Is that not what the courts are for? I imagine that if a court had to enforce a requirement like this, knowledge would generally be the best kind of proof. If you know what the contract said (or even it's terms in general) that would be enough.

The reason this isn't done is because corporations legal departments love writing 10-100 page contracts that absolutely nobody is going to read.

IMO any contract, waver, etc., shouldn't be legally enforceable unless the signatory has actually read it. It's always seemed to me to be one hell of a pathway of abuse (in a way) to just be able to bind someone to be legally required to do anything you want, for example, by just relying on them not reading the thing they signed.

In the United States