That sentence was awkward. Maybe even a typo? The following sentences to the one you just quoted ignores that and proceeds to argue FOR blindfolded chess being like programming with LLMs.

The article itself takes several paragraphs to get to the argument it wants to make and then ends having only argued for a few more sentences. No real evidence is provided either.

Well no, it argues that the SKILLS for playing blindfold chess are similar to people who use LLMs to develop code - not that blindfold chess = vibe coding.

And then earlier in the article defines said skills as having a sense of high-level relationships (chunking, positioning, etc) over the board rather than a photographic memory of the board.

But as I said, the whole article feels very fluffy anyway.

good to see dave still out there doing his thing

I completely agree. I have vibe coded what i would consider to be some pretty weird things in the name of learning facilitation.

Perhaps the best example has been a native macOS app that is a completely custom text editor with built-in debugger, lsp support, fuzzy finder, etc stuff you'd expect. Inside the same app is a library of books i can read within the app completely formatted and for every chapter/section of each book that is a quiz to take (LLM generated of course), a "recitation" tab where i am asked a question and say outloud my response to the AI to evaluate me on and then finally practice problems to do within the custom text editor (these are usually programming books). The reader also has ai re-write built in.

As neat as this is, and i worked through K&R like this, i have ultimately fallen back on "just read the damn book and go to the AI when you've got questions."

i'd completely forgotten about notes on camp, had to read that in modernist criticism class. good stuff.

i see parallels to zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance as well, who's whole thesis if i can recall is something like, "quality cannot be put into words." Its a pre-rational thing that, try as you might, can't be pinned down.

Bob Martin has built a career on asking the wrong questions. He is doing the same here as well.

I think Uncle Bob worship by OOP adherents is crazy, but I also think dismissing him this way is also crazy. His work on popularizing methods for writing good OOP is solid.

But at the end of the day, he's a guy with a long career in programming, which makes him significantly better than the median, but it doesn't make him three sigma above.

In this case, he's got a pretty good short- to medium-term argument that if you have a robust testing and verification suite, AI code that passes it all is a terrific outcome.

I'm really not convinced about long-term. Possibly, AI ends up writing even better in the future and we never have to worry about human maintainability.

But it's also possible AI is at/near its limit, and we'll always need human maintainers. In which case, incomprehensible vibe coding might be a problem.

You just have to make maintainability and readability explicit criteria at the strategic level and hold the AI accountable yourself, same as with testing and linting and the tactical level. Fable can generate code that is absolutely readable by a middle school kid, it'll just be less efficient at it than full jargon-laced fanciness, so finding the sweet spot isn't too hard.

slop

I also answered slop but sadly it said "We do not have enough information to diagnose this pattern yet"

Oh boy, my useless art degree is coming in handy here! This is precisely like the authorship debates that occurred when Warhol hit the scene, or Damien Hirst and many others. It goes further back than that. Duchamp and his urinal, renaissance painters and their workshops. On and on, artists making work for other artists and people debating whether the signee is the one who really created it. "Authorship" is the term for this debate.

If you choose to side with the modern art establishment, this has been a settled debate for decades. Managing signs, systems, instructions, and context is itself a creative act.

If you choose to side with the atelier movement (as one example) it would be a resounding "no". This does not count.

i've moved over to https://www.liftosaur.com/ and its MCP server. It has been so nice to use. Its unfortunately a PWA/Ionic app (dev has a native one coming) but i am more than happy to overlook that with the other features available in it. Dude even wrote his own little DSL for writing programs you can use.

no apple watch app...

> "Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?"

I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).

And at a meta level, every medium of communication shapes its receiver as well (think about the dumbing down effect of TV vs a book).

I didn't read the post and scrolled to a random clause.

"Because you own the code. You've added variants, changed classes, threaded new props. A codemod handles the components you never touched and breaks on the ones you did."

It's so staccato throughout, a human wouldn't write like this.