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`1:47:28`

where we have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL. That about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply that there's a lot, it's possible for society to lose a competence. It's still needs because it's chasing the future. COBOL is still with us. This is one…

`1:48:30`

for what should a young programmer do? You're not gonna be able to predict the future. No one's gonna be able to predict the future. If you like programming, you should learn programming. Now, is that gonna be a career forever? I don't know, but what's gonna be a career forever? Who knows…

`1:49:30`

That's a general life principle. For me, how I look at all endeavors I involve myself in is I want to be content with all outcomes. When we start working on a new product at 37signals, I set up my mental model for its success. And I go, do you know what? If no one wants…

`1:50:30`

so I'm leaning into the meme a little bit, but the vibe coding, meaning you generate code, you have this idea of a thing you want to create, you generate the code and then you fix it with both natural language to the prompts and manually. You learn enough to manually fix it. So that's…

`1:51:31`

You have to do the sit ups. Programming, understanding, learning almost anything requires you to do. Humans are not built to absorb information in a way that transforms into skills by just watching others from afar. Now ironically, it seems AI is actually quite good at that, but humans are not. If you wanna learn how to…

`1:52:31`

That's what happened with Excel. It took the capacity of accountants to become software developers because the tools became so accessible to them that they could build a model for how the business was gonna do next week. That required a programmer prior to Excel. Now it didn't because they could do it themselves by…

`1:53:33`

to create super novel things and a complete product, but they're starting to creep close to that. So if you are investing time now into becoming a really good vibe coder, maybe this is the right thing to do as if it's indeed a skill, we kind of meme about vibe coding, just like sitting…

`1:54:35`

— No one is. — That's one different. — No one is of this generation, but maybe that's a skill. Maybe if you get on the same page as the AI, 'cause there's a consistency to the AI. It's like it really is a pair programmer with a consistent style and structure and so on. Plus…

`1:55:36`

is the reward you get from being a good doer. You have to be a doer first. Now that's not the same as saying that vibe coding, prompt engineering won't be able to produce fully formed amazing systems even shortly. I think that's entirely possible, but then there's no skill left, which maybe…

`1:56:37`

There's very often been people who didn't know how to program, who wanted programs, who then hired programmers, who gave them messy descriptions of what they wanted and then when the programmers delivered that back said, "Oh no, actually that's not what I meant. I want something else." AI may be able to provide…

`1:57:39`

at the current present moment of something that looks like it works, right? But it's flawed in all sorts of ways. There are the obvious ways, the meme ways that it's leaking all your API keys, it's storing your password in plain text. I think that's ultimately solvable. Like it's gonna figure…

`1:58:39`

The kind of mistakes it's making are the kind of mistakes the junior programmers make all the time. — Yeah, can we zoom out and look at the vision, the manifesto, the doctrine of Rails? What are some of the things that make a programming language a framework great? Especially for web development. So we talked about…

`1:59:40`

We forget why Chesterton's Fence is there. We just go like, why is that fence there? Let's yank it out. Oh, it was to keep the wolves out. Now we're all dead, oops. So I wanted to write these things down. And if we just take them quick one by one, you talked about…

`2:00:40`

or the people who built that wrote both exit and quit because they knew humans were likely to pick one or the other. Python is the perfect contrast to this. In the Python interactive protocol, if you write exit, it won't exit. It'll give you a lesson. It'll basically tell you to read the…

`2:01:41`

which is a difficult thing to engineer into a language because you have to kind of, it's a subjective thing. — Which is why you can't do it in one way, which is why I used the example of both exit and quit. The principle of least surprise for some people would be like, "Oh, exit…

`2:02:43`

We just need to pick one, and then that's fine. And if we pick one and we can depend on it, it becomes a convention. And if it's a convention, we don't have to configure it. And if we don't have to configure it, you can get started with you actually care about…

`2:03:45`

You have all these aspirations, they're gonna do some kind of custom, most beautiful Legos castle that nobody's ever built from these pieces. But in reality to be productive in most situations, you just need to build the basic thing. And then on top of that is where your creativity comes. — Absolutely, and I think…

`2:04:49`

There are a billion different dishes and you can configure just your tailored specific configuration of it, but no one done the work to make sure it all fits together. So you have all these unique problems in the JavaScript ecosystem, for example, there's probably 25 major ways of just doing the controller layer. And then…

`2:05:50`

that's wonderful. But on day one you'll get a full menu designed by a chef who really cared about every piece of ingredient and you're gonna enjoy it. And that's again, one of those things where many programmers think like I know better. And they do in some hyper local sense of it…

`2:06:51`

on millions of lines of code? No one can keep that entire system in their head at one time. You have to break it down. Microservices can be a reasonable way to do that. When you're at Netflix scale, when you apply that pattern to a team of 20 programmers working on a code base of…