Morning bathrobe rant: tubes on pegs.

@unclebobmartin never change. I hope to one day be old enough to play with whatever the kids are playing with and do the equivalent of a bathrobe rant. You are a great edutainer.

Amazing to see you vibe coding uncle Bob. You are a legend ser. And you experienced it all full circle. From raw binary to AI generated code. Amazing to think about.

You can tell this man is suffering an existential crisis but trying to smile about it.

I don't disagree with your overall point about people needing to "get over it" wrt AI, however, comparing the move from assembly, to C, to Java, ... isn't quite the same as the move to AI. I view the former as dumb tooling that reduces the amount of typing I had to do. I still had to design the system and understand how to put it all together, AI removes a lot of that "thinking" (understanding) and that makes it a different transition. Much in the same way I saw newbie devs struggle when their tooling failed them because they were lost w/o the tooling (they didn't understand the lower level stuff), AI will take that to an extreme and only the top-tier devs will EVER learn the lower level stuff. AI will deepen the divide between great devs and everyone else (mindless drones). Good or bad? We'll see....

I’m not a computer scientist (although am a mathematician/physicist) so I don’t know if this is a dumb question or not, but do you distinguish between layers of abstraction and layers of approximation? C or Fortran compiling down to assembly which gets converted to binary is a generally deterministic process, whereas AI agents not only aren’t nearly as deterministic but English is also often only an approximation to code. Or does it just not matter once you can have multiple swarms of multiple agents to effectively ‘Monte Carlo’ your way to an ensemble of solutions, and then pick the best bits of each?

Tell me more about the TERMINFO grandpa

What a coincidence. I was just looking at that the other day.

the BSD folks apparently care more about this kinda stuff. i get frustrated when distro's don't handle this properly

wrote about this 3 years ago:

It’s amazing to think about the transformations you have seen over time. Did you ever think we would be building code in any way like this with AI?

The abstraction ladder framing is useful. The part I’d separate is leverage vs verification. C, Java, Ruby, etc. raised the level while keeping deterministic contracts. AI raises leverage too, but the developer still owns intent, invariants, and review.

Yo, back in 2022 I was just vibe coding, man. I’d open Cursor or Codex and just describe the vibe, buttery smooth, make it feel and boom, it shipped. It was fun and fast. Now the agents overthink everything, turn simple vibes into over-engineered sludge. Still fun… mostly.

First of all, thank you for being in a bathrobe

I was finally able to create my first useful program. Its an app i use all day everyday and makes my life so much better! Anytime i think of a new feature that would make it even more useful i get it coded up and uploaded within minutes mostly. Powerful stuff :)

now this is real flex

How long until the agents are "writing" tubes and pegs? At least then we won't feel guilty for not checking the code....

You missed C# which leap frogged Java for a long while till Java 24+ green threads.

Among the SWE stalwarts I always look upto, I feel right now, @unclebobmartin has most clarity on agentic software engineering!

❤️

Thank you for reframing the “problem” - we coders always felt guilty or anxious about letting go of the reins but I’m much more at ease now

Crap analysis. That's what the industry is mostly missing

Love your rant. You should do this without your teeth and wack your cane occasionally for emphasis.

I'll have to wait until I lose my teeth. Dentist says that could be another couple of decades. I turns out that if you floss regularly, you can keep your teeth for a very long time.

Great talk, exciting af!

@kostyafarber_ us in 30 years 😂

Fair enough. One has to wonder, though, will there ever be a point where the level of abstraction is too high?

i love you uncle bob

It's not over yet?

I too “wrote” a full c# msx emulator. It worked fine after some tries. At work we vibe coded a full integration layer between two pretty big systems. The company did a soft layoff and switched the tech stack from dotnet to jvm (Kotlin) We have incidents every day 🫠

I am very happy that with all the hate around the AI and supposedly lack of quality, you that are a reference of code quality, good architecture, maintenable systems, are embraced so much the AI and give us a example to follow. Makes me have more reasons to ignore those AI haters

"loss of anoying details" ...yeah and i love it!