IMO the reason why people yearn for tools that generate code is that programming is broken—everything now is giant layer cakes of huge, complex and intransparent frameworks designed by and for large teams in giant tech companies.

The same tech companies that flooded programming with overly complex tools, endless toolchains, new programming languages du jour every few years, required backwards-compatibility breaking updates and mandatory design overhauls are now selling you “AI” to generate code for the mess they made.

@thomasfuchs I disagree. They want LLMs to generate code because they resent people who took time to learn a craft and they see this as a low effort shortcut.

Art hasn't become too complicated, music hasn't become too complicated, writing hasn't become too complicated. Yet people are generating that too.

@thomasfuchs My wife and I have tried to learn programming and struggle a lot with it, mostly due to the complexity it has become.

Like we’ve both got the basics down because back in the early-mid 2000s, when we were in high school, we learned some pretty basic programming stuff.

And then didn’t touch it for decades.

Now we’re in our late 30’s and want to get back into it…but everything is so complex and confusing. All of the courses and books and advice contradicts each other.

@megabyteghost @thomasfuchs I programmed in BASIC as a child. I've taken some classes, worked a bit with Perl and Python, but mostly shell scripting.

But when I read software developers talking about what they do, I barely understand it.

@foolishowl @megabyteghost And there's no reason why shouldn't be able to understand them.

The way software is made today is essentially exclusively to gate-keep people out of it with no actual technical, performance, monetary or other benefits.

@thomasfuchs and now you kniw why I want a brutally simple #Linux distro like @OS1337 !

• Because shit should he simple and there is no "legitimate excuse" for it to be worse...

@soviut No, normal people dgaf about programming and aren’t seeking it out, “Magic” tools or not.

It’s 99% existing programmers who welcome LLMs for programming with open arms.

@thomasfuchs did you see @brentsimmons little note https://inessential.com/2025/08/28/easy-app-writing.html

@thomasfuchs A lot of programming is more similar to plumbing than doing anything particularly interesting. It's figuring out how to connect the output of one library/framework to the input of another to do something useful. That shit is often abstract in the extreme, incomprehensible to a normal person, and not very interesting from a computer science perspective.

That's why I like low-level stuff; it feels more real to flip bits in a register, and knowing how a CPU works actually matters.

@thomasfuchs Anecdotally, I've seen plenty of non-programmers say things like "I'm not a programmer, so I used ChatGPT to help whip up this python script". Dozens of hardware youtubers use it for this specific reason.

Meanwhile, the programmers aren't using it because they yearn for simpler times; we're in the simpler times. They're using them to do drudge work. Porting and decompilation projects have seen dramatic improvements, for example.

My original point was about vibe coders being just like the other art, music and writing slop peddlers. They don't see this as another tool, they want it to be a replacement for those pesky programmers/artists/musicians/writers who dared to charge money for something they couldn't do themselves.

@thomasfuchs it doesn't seem to dawn on anyone that enormous, sprawling attack surfaces are a bad thing, when you care about #infosec

@malcircuit Programming doesn't have to be plumbing, that's a relatively new thing that only came about with huge tech companies making stuff that's meant to support thousands of people working on a piece of software

@ravenonthill @thomasfuchs If it isn't one of the crappy tools/languages OP describes, that labor intensity is also a deep source of joy for many folks like myself. There is something special about getting lost in the flow of writing solid code that can't be found anywhere else.

But I don't even get a touch of that with these ridiculous frameworks.

@foolishowl this is me exactly. learned BASIC just by tinkering with QBasic on my parents' computer. learned a little Python for data analytics class. literally right this moment looking at a bash cheat sheet to do myself a little script to assist with a common task. i have basically no formal training in programming, but feel like code should be, erm, legible? like, i should be able to look at code, commented or not, and get at least an idea of what it does. @megabyteghost @thomasfuchs

@peachfiend @foolishowl @megabyteghost @thomasfuchs Same, only I ended up later going to university for it and making a career of it. I found a BASIC manual when I was 12, and I've been hooked ever since, 3 1/2 decades now. And your intuition about quality code is dead on.

@peachfiend @foolishowl @thomasfuchs Python is what my wife and I were working on last…I’m still dabbling but I think she’s given up. I saw her take out her Python book the other day though so maybe she’s thinking about it again.

I’ve also tried Rust (against everyone’s suggestion), Elixir, and various game engines. Oh and Ruby, a little bit. I can do some level of PHP and JS because of working on sites in WordPress for years, but barely.

@megabyteghost What's the biggest blocker for you two to learn Python? It's been my preferred language for a couple of decades now, so I'm interested to know and might even be able to help a little.

@thomasfuchs OO programming was supposed to simplified the complexity of objects instead people made layers of complexity out of objects. Templates/generics were supposed to simplify the complexity of generic objects instead it complexity even worse.

Concepts and type traits are most likely going to do the same.

@thomasfuchs @malcircuit “Out of the Tar Pit” is a great paper that distinguishes between incidental complexity and complexity inherent to the problem. Its the former that’s so infuriating and something I’m trying to cut out with https://mastrojs.github.io

@thomasfuchs And whenever I try to talk to people, in this very industry no less, about how awful and pointless these modern frameworks are, I always get the same responses.

"But $foo has changed how modern computing works!"

"You just don't understand how modern computing works."

Look around, modern computing _doesn't_ work. Everything is broken, every tool presented to the public is tedious to use. Everything we build anymore is pure shite.

@hosford42 @ravenonthill @thomasfuchs Also, half of the labor intensity is in reading the code that is written, and the attempts to de-verbosify it.

The lesser tools seem to want to make it more verbose, and the LLM A.I.s are all too willing to write more, like they're a university student who needs to meet a word count for their essay, and they're just a couple hundred words short, but they said everything they needed and wanted to say.

@foolishowl @megabyteghost @thomasfuchs

It's like building a brick wall.
"Simple" programming is building a wall out of bricks.

A lot of software development has become: "What if we already glued 20 bricks to each other? That way we could build brick walls faster!"

And now you have a brick that has 20 times the weight of a normal brick, so you need special tools to even handle it.

So if you hear people talking about "PrefabLift3000" or "the new auto-corner-tool" or "BrickAI", these are just attempts to manage the chaos created by those earlier "improvements".

@hosford42 I really appreciate that! That’s very kind of you.

I don’t really know what I’m getting stuck on. I wish I had an answer.

I mean some of it is definitely discipline. I’m just not sticking it through. I’m not being forced to do it, so I give up easy when the dopamine runs out.

Actually thinking about it now, and I’m typing while I think now (which is also how I write every day lol) one of the bigger issues is that a big part of my motivation in things is being able…

…to share my creations. And python doesn’t really make that easy, especially for a beginner. There isn’t a package I can just send out.

I also want to build for the web, so Flask and/or Django are on my list of things to learn but it feels like it’s taking me a long time to get there.

Everything is like “learn python first then learn the web frameworks”

But we’re approaching the end of 2025…there’s gotta be a way to learn python THROUGH the web frameworks.

@megabyteghost I don't really work with web frameworks much at all, but if I was going to suggest one, I'd say start with flask, or one of the several other frameworks that are similar to it because they emulated something worth emulating.

As for the packaging thing, you actually can package it and send it out! Have a look at this tutorial:

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/packaging-projects/

The "wheel" file can be shared directly if you don't want to make it public on the Python package index. There are also tools that can be used to package your script up as an .exe.

@thomasfuchs thats why i stick with ObjC. Backwards compatible to C from the 90ties, instead of the newest Apple shit called Swift which requires you starting from scratch again, breaking compatibility with the past

@afink I think Objective-C—while certainly having its own problems—is very underrated and unfairly maligned.

@nuintari @thomasfuchs "everything is broken"? How are we getting anything done, then?