Future of programming

`4:00:31`

Yeah. I think the good thing about my current position is I really don't need the money. So I get to build these things purely for my own enjoyment and purity of vision, which has this weird quality where sometimes when you stop caring about what everyone else thinks or wants or whatever, and you just pursue this singular vision, it ends up becoming far more appealing. That it's when you try to do, oh, I should do this because these people want that, or I should do this and this and so on, you start watering the thing down and suddenly it's a bland ball of nothing. So I mean, again, the thing too here is directionally, I just want computers to be this way. So if Omarchy should end up being just a, a little footnote in history that it was part of this early movement of the agentic OS and the malleable computer, that's also okay. I'm completely at peace with that. As long as I get to have a computer that is as fun to work with as Omarchy-... that's great. I've had the same thing with Ruby and with Rails. From very early I went, do you know what? I love Ruby. It's such a great programming language. But if a better programming language comes along, I, me, I'm going to use it. If a better Rails comes along, I'm gonna use it. And I think, and I love Ruby, and I will continue to write Ruby even just for the sheer fun of it, like I would go ride a horse. I have in the stables, even though I have a Model Y in the garage. The language now is English. It's a cliche, but it's also true.

Like I've been programming in English for the last three months. I've been reading a lot of code, but I'm programming in English. I'm telling the computer what to do, and I'm using natural language, and it is shockingly even more delightful. If there is one programming language more beautiful than Ruby, it is the English language.

`4:02:36`

Beautiful. It's beautiful. And I mean, the reason I say this in part is I always loved writing. I always just loved the English language-... for the sheer beauty of it for the sheer intricacy, for the depth of it. I mean, Ruby is a very expressive programming language, but it can't hold a candle to English. I mean, all the poetry and literature in the world that's been expressed through the English language. I mean, I like a beautiful code poem, but I mean, the real deal in English is just on a different level.

`4:04:56`

I think that's exactly spot on, and this is the fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of programmers have of AI, is that they wish it was deterministic. No, no, no. Temperature is the most beautiful part of the AI setup. The fact that it is not deterministic, the fact that creativity requires little tweaks in the road, that the human brain, if it was perfectly deterministic, would not be the creative brain that it is. And the main charge against AI both-- It's funny. It's a contradiction. There's both the charge that it's not deterministic and therefore bad, and also that it is not creative. It's one or the other, bro. Either it's non-deterministic and therefore creative, therefore, to some degree random, or it's... or it's not creative. So we, we can-- Both of those charges can't be true at the same time, and I have fully come to embrace the fact that the same prompt won't produce the same response every time. You can't step at the same river twice, and it is the most beautiful part of the whole interaction. It's what makes it so human. In fact, this is one of the things I've been thinking about in my own sort of meta-analysis, is just how much of my own personal brain works like next token prediction. I sit down to write an essay. I have this vague, fuzzy premise I want to convey, and I sit down at the keys, and I could not tell you what the next token was gonna be in advance.