Thursday, 6th February 2025
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard.
I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away.
It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
The future belongs to idea guys who can just do things. Geoffrey Huntley with a provocative take on AI-assisted programming:
I seriously can't see a path forward where the majority of software engineers are doing artisanal hand-crafted commits by as soon as the end of 2026.
He calls for companies to invest in high quality internal training and create space for employees to figure out these new tools:
It's hackathon (during business hours) once a month, every month time.
Geoffrey's concluding note resonates with me. LLMs are a gift to the fiercely curious and ambitious:
If you’re a high agency person, there’s never been a better time to be alive...
sqlite-page-explorer (via) Outstanding tool by Luke Rissacher for understanding the SQLite file format. Download the application (built using redbean and Cosmopolitan, so the same binary runs on Windows, Mac and Linux) and point it at a SQLite database to get a local web application with an interface for exploring how the file is structured.
Here's it running against the datasette.io/content database that runs the official Datasette website:
Datasette 1.0a17. New Datasette alpha, with a bunch of small changes and bug fixes accumulated over the past few months. Some (minor) highlights:
- The register_magic_parameters(datasette) plugin hook can now register async functions. (#2441)
- Breadcrumbs on database and table pages now include a consistent self-link for resetting query string parameters. (#2454)
- New internal methods
datasette.set_actor_cookie()anddatasette.delete_actor_cookie(), described here. (#1690)/-/permissionspage now shows a list of all permissions registered by plugins. (#1943)- If a table has a single unique text column Datasette now detects that as the foreign key label for that table. (#2458)
- The
/-/permissionspage now includes options for filtering or exclude permission checks recorded against the current user. (#2460)
I was incentivized to push this release by an issue I ran into in my new datasette-load plugin, which resulted in this fix:
- Fixed a bug where replacing a database with a new one with the same name did not pick up the new database correctly. (#2465)