4 ms·

I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

45 points by jerpint 8mo ago

anonymous908213 8mo ago
> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does, to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in the magic word wasting hours of my time, a failure that is not my fault but a failure for which I bear the negative consequences of, is infuriating enough that I am always compelled to have more understanding and eventually more control of everything I write.
- lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
  People get really defensive when I point out that they are proud of the things that they don’t know. Willful ignorance and anti-intellectualism is a cancer in anything it infiltrates and SWE is no different.
  - furyofantares 8mo ago
    There was a snarky comment earlier saying, try implementing something that's too hard for you, THEN try going back to writing code by hand - implying agents are indispensable. And I thought to myself that the most memorable parts of my career, the most rewarding parts, were when I took some task that was too hard for me, then, with great effort, became a developer for whom that task was no longer too hard for me.
    - CuriouslyC 8mo ago
      All the times I told someone I could do something I didn't know how to do but believed was possible then had to figure it out filled me with existential dread. There was a good feeling after I succeeded, but I get a good feeling from just building something big and functional with AI, as long as I feel like I was the driving force behind the ideas in the thing, so maybe I don't need the stress?
      - bitwize 8mo ago
        That kind of stress is how you grow. It's good for you. None of that stress means no growth.
        CuriouslyC 8mo ago
        There's an inverted U curve with stress benefit, and I think you can still find the optimum by reaching higher on the shoulders of giants.
        furyofantares 8mo ago
        Yeah, but LLMs are not giants in terms of capabilities (depth). They are medium sized at best, despite being superhuman in other ways (breadth, speed). You can use these to help you learn but, at least if you're a developer, letting it stunt your growth seems like a mistake.
        bitwize 8mo ago
        Newton studied his forebears and understood their findings before contributing his own. He was stressed with the knowledge of his own ignorance, but then he learned and set himself up to make more profound discoveries. That's what it means to "stand on the shoulders of giants". Not to be a perpetual idea guy, outsource the hard part to someone else's computer with little to no effort or learning on your part, and roll on HN like "bitches mad 'cause I found the royal road to geometry".
- eduardogarza 8mo ago
  Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others? If you're trying to accomplish X, how much does all this matter directly related to X? There's always infinite number of things to learn about and depth in every dimension. We explore depth where we are each personally curious or where its necessary. I liked the post. It was short and concise and presents a unique way to view this new coding paradigm. "If I have seen further than others, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants," Isaac Newton
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - purple_turtle 8mo ago
    There is difference in taking pride of not knowing things and considering it as regrettable necessity.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ggregoryarms 8mo ago
    I suspect Newton is rolling in his grave at your words. Standing on the shoulders of giants also means respecting the giants. That means dedicating time to learning what they have to teach. Not treating them as a black box with no credit or consent, in the name of your own "glory".
  - anonymous908213 8mo ago
    > Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and not really but I would absolutely learn about it if I had any ability to control it. As it is, knowing more about material properties would not allow me to improve my programs, and I do not have a hardware foundry so it would not allow me to improve the hardware either. If I happened upon 1 trillion dollars or so, though, I would certainly invest time in learning all of the technical details of hardware manufacturing with the goal of creating a better hardware stack than the ones that we currently have available to us. I didn't understand nearly as much from the start of my programming journey, of course. But as others mentioned, that was a weakness, not a strength. The lack of understanding bothered me, and I was able to learn all of the things that I did because I was continuously pushing myself to learn and understand more. If I had settled for never trying to understand, to just accept my current knowledge as the limits of my knowledge forevermore, then obviously I never would have been able to. Over months and years, I was able to continuously expand my knowledge little by little until eventually knowing a lot, rather than stagnating in the same place forever. There are still things I don't understand, of course, and my learning journey continues even today.
- jerpint 8mo ago
  Author here - I agree that to learn the best thing is to implement and fail along the way. My point was I would never professionally opt to write a sorting algorithm instead of using the builtin sort() most languages come equipped with
gritspants 8mo ago
I love this! Just sculpting the wrinkles right out of my brains!
xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
Why is it that AI glazing blog posts like this inevitably use a shitty AI generated image? I am absolutely sick to bits of seeing them
- andy99 8mo ago
  I call it “AI blindness”, people genuinely don’t see what’s bad about AI output, it happens across code, text, and images. Same as the title itself being X not Y AI slop.
- w4yai 8mo ago
  Why are you sick of AI images, but you're not about stock images ? They've equally filled the web and articles for the last years. At least, AI images feel more on point.
  - alexwennerberg 8mo ago
    > Why are you sick of AI images, but you're not about stock images ? Both are bad. Just use text.
  - laristine 8mo ago
    Maybe because OP likes images that were actually taken and stock images are fine that way. Different people can have different preferences.
    - derekp7 8mo ago
      My problem with stock photos is that unless it is clearly a stock image, it can mislead. For example, when looking up information on the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House, the article had a stock photo of a modern photo-voltaic panel. So I was initially confused, as what was described was a solar collector that concentrates the sun's heat to provide hot water for the kitchen. Which makes a lot more sense of why it wasn't re-installed during some roof renovations under Regan (the initial purpose of it was more to inspire the nation, that wouldn't be served much by re-installing it after it had been removed for roof work as the original moment had passed).
pat_erichsen 8mo ago
I wrote something very similar back in October! The "sculpting" metaphor really stuck for me. https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling
- bitwize 8mo ago
  I think it's telling that the sculptor guy in your essay's vibe art (who resembles Fix-it Felix/The Carpenter) is completely oblivious to the fact that he just carved a foot where a hand should be. It tracks for vibe coders.
teekert 8mo ago
I know the feeling. I still wonder though, am I faster? Do I understand what I’ve made as well as I used to? What have I learned? How did the experience benefit me? What value did I gain? Idk. Hoping there will be research soon.
- shakna 8mo ago
  https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  Do your own n=1 research! Unfortunately the only companies that would fund this would be AI labs. They aren't going to report that it sucks One cool way I saw someone do it was to estimate a task and then randomize whether they'd use AI or hand code it
shiveenp 8mo ago
I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional. The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.
- kzalesak 8mo ago
  I, on the other hand strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer by profession, but a programmer by need - I write tools to get stuff done, and this is exactly the missing link. I am able to craft algorithms, architectures and focus on the UI, and llms (mostly Claude) allow me to write the low-level that needs to be written that I inspect. What used to take days takes hours and allows us to solve issue we were previously not able to in our org.
  - captain_coffee 8mo ago
    > strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer Yep - there it is
- stefan_ 8mo ago
  Theres a lot more AI hype vendors than AI produced software anyone is actually using it seems.
- 7777332215 8mo ago
  People who were very bad 0.01x devs (or not devs at all) that now feel competent because they can produce something when previously they could produce nothing.
my_throwaway23 8mo ago
While I experience a very disturbing nausea, with just a healthy bit of existential dread, whenever I read whatever these AI Bros(TM) manage to... ahem, "sculpt", you actually managed to write something not immediately recognizeable as slop. Kudos. Points deducted for the wholly unnecessary image. Text can, after all, stand on its own. You are, however, strongly influenced by the writings of the tool covered by your musings. Might I suggest to perhaps not indulge in such excessive hyphenation?
Kerrick 8mo ago
Did the word "Refactoring" become uncool when Design Patterns did the same?
rtgfhyuj 8mo ago
ai slop justifications will become the norm.
bitwize 8mo ago
I feel most like I'm sculpting code when I'm working in Lisp. I can sort of feel the shape and contour of the procedure I'm creating as I work. Even when writing in something like C, I feel the feeling of "filling out a tax form". Making sure all the things in Section 1 boxes A through E are correct, because Section 6 box D depends on them being so. Coding with AI assistance feels like what it is: outsourcing. Letting an accountant take care of the tax forms, except the accountant is Wheatley from Portal 2: a chatty, subtly below-the-threshold-of-competence robot.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
throwaway150 8mo ago
Is this post "sculpted" too? It certainly looks suspiciously so. It feels disrespectful to expect people to read something you could not be bothered to write yourself.
- jerpint 8mo ago
  Author here - wrote this myself but I’ll take that as a complement :)
dgreensp 8mo ago
This piece starts off making it sound like the computer is pretty much doing all the work, while the human maybe weighs in on a matter of taste once in a while, if they like, but by the end, the list of what the LLM can actually do is really short. Implementing a sorting algorithm for you, perhaps, but not necessarily one without “egregious flaws,” and really you should still use a library for that. Replacing high-quality libraries of mature software, that have tests, etc, is obviously one of the poorer uses of vibe-slop coding. It comes down to “adding code” that attempts to, or seems to, achieve something.
mcphage 8mo ago
> I think about what we are trying to implement, and if this iteration brings us closer to it. > Where things go, how pieces fit, reusable patterns - this is more question of subjective taste and big-picture thinking. I do that, too, only I call it coding, and it doesn’t require me to rewrite a bunch of badly written slop first.
antisol 8mo ago
> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. Well then I guess times haven't changed, because you still haven't written a sorting algorithm. Instead you've - at best - done a code review for one. One that based on my experience is almost certainly a shoddy, substandard implementation with the type of quality I'd be professionally embarrassed to attach my name to in a commit log. > I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And you'd have been better off, because now you've got the burden of maintaining a poorly-implemented sorting algorithm that you don't understand that's living in your codebase. What could possibly go wrong? Further, those abstractions that you just threw away to roll your own encryption were written by actually talented people who actually took the time to think about their implementation before shitting it out into the world. The implementations you'll find in libaries will be superior in every way to the trash your LLM will pump out. So, TL;DR: congratulations, you've just announced to the world that you're proud that you're a bad coder and that the software you're being paid to produce is getting worse. Totally unrelated video I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ (for those with the kind of attention span that causes them to use LLMs, maybe just skip ahead to the "this is what you sound like" section, circa 17 mins)
pentaphobe 8mo ago
"Sculpting" as used here just feels like a pretentious euphemism for "vibing" as opposed to what actual sculpting is like (hint: it would be akin to... dramatic pause... writing code) Brb, just rolled my eyes so hard that I'm now staring at my own visual cortex

45 points by jerpint 8mo ago

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does, to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in the magic word wasting hours of my time, a failure that is not my fault but a failure for which I bear the negative consequences of, is infuriating enough that I am always compelled to have more understanding and eventually more control of everything I write.

lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
People get really defensive when I point out that they are proud of the things that they don’t know. Willful ignorance and anti-intellectualism is a cancer in anything it infiltrates and SWE is no different.
- furyofantares 8mo ago
  There was a snarky comment earlier saying, try implementing something that's too hard for you, THEN try going back to writing code by hand - implying agents are indispensable. And I thought to myself that the most memorable parts of my career, the most rewarding parts, were when I took some task that was too hard for me, then, with great effort, became a developer for whom that task was no longer too hard for me.
  - CuriouslyC 8mo ago
    All the times I told someone I could do something I didn't know how to do but believed was possible then had to figure it out filled me with existential dread. There was a good feeling after I succeeded, but I get a good feeling from just building something big and functional with AI, as long as I feel like I was the driving force behind the ideas in the thing, so maybe I don't need the stress?
    - bitwize 8mo ago
      That kind of stress is how you grow. It's good for you. None of that stress means no growth.
      - CuriouslyC 8mo ago
        There's an inverted U curve with stress benefit, and I think you can still find the optimum by reaching higher on the shoulders of giants.
        furyofantares 8mo ago
        Yeah, but LLMs are not giants in terms of capabilities (depth). They are medium sized at best, despite being superhuman in other ways (breadth, speed). You can use these to help you learn but, at least if you're a developer, letting it stunt your growth seems like a mistake.
        bitwize 8mo ago
        Newton studied his forebears and understood their findings before contributing his own. He was stressed with the knowledge of his own ignorance, but then he learned and set himself up to make more profound discoveries. That's what it means to "stand on the shoulders of giants". Not to be a perpetual idea guy, outsource the hard part to someone else's computer with little to no effort or learning on your part, and roll on HN like "bitches mad 'cause I found the royal road to geometry".
eduardogarza 8mo ago
Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others? If you're trying to accomplish X, how much does all this matter directly related to X? There's always infinite number of things to learn about and depth in every dimension. We explore depth where we are each personally curious or where its necessary. I liked the post. It was short and concise and presents a unique way to view this new coding paradigm. "If I have seen further than others, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants," Isaac Newton
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- purple_turtle 8mo ago
  There is difference in taking pride of not knowing things and considering it as regrettable necessity.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- ggregoryarms 8mo ago
  I suspect Newton is rolling in his grave at your words. Standing on the shoulders of giants also means respecting the giants. That means dedicating time to learning what they have to teach. Not treating them as a black box with no credit or consent, in the name of your own "glory".
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  > Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and not really but I would absolutely learn about it if I had any ability to control it. As it is, knowing more about material properties would not allow me to improve my programs, and I do not have a hardware foundry so it would not allow me to improve the hardware either. If I happened upon 1 trillion dollars or so, though, I would certainly invest time in learning all of the technical details of hardware manufacturing with the goal of creating a better hardware stack than the ones that we currently have available to us. I didn't understand nearly as much from the start of my programming journey, of course. But as others mentioned, that was a weakness, not a strength. The lack of understanding bothered me, and I was able to learn all of the things that I did because I was continuously pushing myself to learn and understand more. If I had settled for never trying to understand, to just accept my current knowledge as the limits of my knowledge forevermore, then obviously I never would have been able to. Over months and years, I was able to continuously expand my knowledge little by little until eventually knowing a lot, rather than stagnating in the same place forever. There are still things I don't understand, of course, and my learning journey continues even today.
jerpint 8mo ago
Author here - I agree that to learn the best thing is to implement and fail along the way. My point was I would never professionally opt to write a sorting algorithm instead of using the builtin sort() most languages come equipped with

gritspants 8mo ago

I love this! Just sculpting the wrinkles right out of my brains!

xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago

Why is it that AI glazing blog posts like this inevitably use a shitty AI generated image? I am absolutely sick to bits of seeing them

andy99 8mo ago
I call it “AI blindness”, people genuinely don’t see what’s bad about AI output, it happens across code, text, and images. Same as the title itself being X not Y AI slop.
w4yai 8mo ago
Why are you sick of AI images, but you're not about stock images ? They've equally filled the web and articles for the last years. At least, AI images feel more on point.
- alexwennerberg 8mo ago
  > Why are you sick of AI images, but you're not about stock images ? Both are bad. Just use text.
- laristine 8mo ago
  Maybe because OP likes images that were actually taken and stock images are fine that way. Different people can have different preferences.
  - derekp7 8mo ago
    My problem with stock photos is that unless it is clearly a stock image, it can mislead. For example, when looking up information on the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House, the article had a stock photo of a modern photo-voltaic panel. So I was initially confused, as what was described was a solar collector that concentrates the sun's heat to provide hot water for the kitchen. Which makes a lot more sense of why it wasn't re-installed during some roof renovations under Regan (the initial purpose of it was more to inspire the nation, that wouldn't be served much by re-installing it after it had been removed for roof work as the original moment had passed).

pat_erichsen 8mo ago

I wrote something very similar back in October! The "sculpting" metaphor really stuck for me. https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling

bitwize 8mo ago
I think it's telling that the sculptor guy in your essay's vibe art (who resembles Fix-it Felix/The Carpenter) is completely oblivious to the fact that he just carved a foot where a hand should be. It tracks for vibe coders.

teekert 8mo ago

I know the feeling. I still wonder though, am I faster? Do I understand what I’ve made as well as I used to? What have I learned? How did the experience benefit me? What value did I gain? Idk. Hoping there will be research soon.

shakna 8mo ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
AstroBen 8mo ago
Do your own n=1 research! Unfortunately the only companies that would fund this would be AI labs. They aren't going to report that it sucks One cool way I saw someone do it was to estimate a task and then randomize whether they'd use AI or hand code it

shiveenp 8mo ago

I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional. The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.

kzalesak 8mo ago
I, on the other hand strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer by profession, but a programmer by need - I write tools to get stuff done, and this is exactly the missing link. I am able to craft algorithms, architectures and focus on the UI, and llms (mostly Claude) allow me to write the low-level that needs to be written that I inspect. What used to take days takes hours and allows us to solve issue we were previously not able to in our org.
- captain_coffee 8mo ago
  > strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer Yep - there it is
stefan_ 8mo ago
Theres a lot more AI hype vendors than AI produced software anyone is actually using it seems.
7777332215 8mo ago
People who were very bad 0.01x devs (or not devs at all) that now feel competent because they can produce something when previously they could produce nothing.

my_throwaway23 8mo ago

While I experience a very disturbing nausea, with just a healthy bit of existential dread, whenever I read whatever these AI Bros(TM) manage to... ahem, "sculpt", you actually managed to write something not immediately recognizeable as slop. Kudos. Points deducted for the wholly unnecessary image. Text can, after all, stand on its own. You are, however, strongly influenced by the writings of the tool covered by your musings. Might I suggest to perhaps not indulge in such excessive hyphenation?

Kerrick 8mo ago

Did the word "Refactoring" become uncool when Design Patterns did the same?

rtgfhyuj 8mo ago

ai slop justifications will become the norm.

bitwize 8mo ago

I feel most like I'm sculpting code when I'm working in Lisp. I can sort of feel the shape and contour of the procedure I'm creating as I work. Even when writing in something like C, I feel the feeling of "filling out a tax form". Making sure all the things in Section 1 boxes A through E are correct, because Section 6 box D depends on them being so. Coding with AI assistance feels like what it is: outsourcing. Letting an accountant take care of the tax forms, except the accountant is Wheatley from Portal 2: a chatty, subtly below-the-threshold-of-competence robot.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

throwaway150 8mo ago

Is this post "sculpted" too? It certainly looks suspiciously so. It feels disrespectful to expect people to read something you could not be bothered to write yourself.

jerpint 8mo ago
Author here - wrote this myself but I’ll take that as a complement :)

dgreensp 8mo ago

This piece starts off making it sound like the computer is pretty much doing all the work, while the human maybe weighs in on a matter of taste once in a while, if they like, but by the end, the list of what the LLM can actually do is really short. Implementing a sorting algorithm for you, perhaps, but not necessarily one without “egregious flaws,” and really you should still use a library for that. Replacing high-quality libraries of mature software, that have tests, etc, is obviously one of the poorer uses of vibe-slop coding. It comes down to “adding code” that attempts to, or seems to, achieve something.

mcphage 8mo ago

> I think about what we are trying to implement, and if this iteration brings us closer to it. > Where things go, how pieces fit, reusable patterns - this is more question of subjective taste and big-picture thinking. I do that, too, only I call it coding, and it doesn’t require me to rewrite a bunch of badly written slop first.

antisol 8mo ago

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. Well then I guess times haven't changed, because you still haven't written a sorting algorithm. Instead you've - at best - done a code review for one. One that based on my experience is almost certainly a shoddy, substandard implementation with the type of quality I'd be professionally embarrassed to attach my name to in a commit log. > I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience. And you'd have been better off, because now you've got the burden of maintaining a poorly-implemented sorting algorithm that you don't understand that's living in your codebase. What could possibly go wrong? Further, those abstractions that you just threw away to roll your own encryption were written by actually talented people who actually took the time to think about their implementation before shitting it out into the world. The implementations you'll find in libaries will be superior in every way to the trash your LLM will pump out. So, TL;DR: congratulations, you've just announced to the world that you're proud that you're a bad coder and that the software you're being paid to produce is getting worse. Totally unrelated video I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ (for those with the kind of attention span that causes them to use LLMs, maybe just skip ahead to the "this is what you sound like" section, circa 17 mins)

pentaphobe 8mo ago

"Sculpting" as used here just feels like a pretentious euphemism for "vibing" as opposed to what actual sculpting is like (hint: it would be akin to... dramatic pause... writing code) Brb, just rolled my eyes so hard that I'm now staring at my own visual cortex