I don't write code anymore – I sculpt it

[gritspants]

I love this! Just sculpting the wrinkles right out of my brains!

[teekert]

I know the feeling. I still wonder though, am I faster? Do I understand what I’ve made as well as I used to? What have I learned? How did the experience benefit me? What value did I gain?

Idk. Hoping there will be research soon.

[shakna]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

[AstroBen]

Do your own n=1 research! Unfortunately the only companies that would fund this would be AI labs. They aren't going to report that it sucks

One cool way I saw someone do it was to estimate a task and then randomize whether they'd use AI or hand code it

[throwaway150]

Is this post "sculpted" too? It certainly looks suspiciously so. It feels disrespectful to expect people to read something you could not be bothered to write yourself.

[jerpint]

Author here - wrote this myself but I’ll take that as a complement :)

[pat_erichsen]

I wrote something very similar back in October! The "sculpting" metaphor really stuck for me.

https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling

[bitwize]

I think it's telling that the sculptor guy in your essay's vibe art (who resembles Fix-it Felix/The Carpenter) is completely oblivious to the fact that he just carved a foot where a hand should be.

It tracks for vibe coders.

[bitwize]

I feel most like I'm sculpting code when I'm working in Lisp. I can sort of feel the shape and contour of the procedure I'm creating as I work. Even when writing in something like C, I feel the feeling of "filling out a tax form". Making sure all the things in Section 1 boxes A through E are correct, because Section 6 box D depends on them being so.

Coding with AI assistance feels like what it is: outsourcing. Letting an accountant take care of the tax forms, except the accountant is Wheatley from Portal 2: a chatty, subtly below-the-threshold-of-competence robot.

[anonymous908213]

> I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience.

And by doing so, never gain experience of your own. It is a truly alien mindset to me to take pride in never understanding what code does, to be comfortable relying entirely on magic words provided to you by others. For me, the simple existence of a bug in the magic word wasting hours of my time, a failure that is not my fault but a failure for which I bear the negative consequences of, is infuriating enough that I am always compelled to have more understanding and eventually more control of everything I write.

[jerpint]

Author here - I agree that to learn the best thing is to implement and fail along the way. My point was I would never professionally opt to write a sorting algorithm instead of using the builtin sort() most languages come equipped with

[lifetimerubyist]

People get really defensive when I point out that they are proud of the things that they don’t know. Willful ignorance and anti-intellectualism is a cancer in anything it infiltrates and SWE is no different.

[eduardogarza]

Why do you sound so petty? Do you understand every single layer of the stack below you? Do you understand how your code gets translated down to C, assembly, machine code? How all that becomes electrical signals on a PCB? How the material properties work at the physical level and how its manufactured? Because if you don't, aren't you, myself and basically everyone relying on the 'magic' words of others?

If you're trying to accomplish X, how much does all this matter directly related to X? There's always infinite number of things to learn about and depth in every dimension. We explore depth where we are each personally curious or where its necessary.

I liked the post. It was short and concise and presents a unique way to view this new coding paradigm.

"If I have seen further than others, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants," Isaac Newton

[Kerrick]

Did the word "Refactoring" become uncool when Design Patterns did the same?

[mcphage]

> I think about what we are trying to implement, and if this iteration brings us closer to it.

> Where things go, how pieces fit, reusable patterns - this is more question of subjective taste and big-picture thinking.

I do that, too, only I call it coding, and it doesn’t require me to rewrite a bunch of badly written slop first.

[pentaphobe]

"Sculpting" as used here just feels like a pretentious euphemism for "vibing" as opposed to what actual sculpting is like (hint: it would be akin to... dramatic pause... writing code)

Brb, just rolled my eyes so hard that I'm now staring at my own visual cortex

[dgreensp]

This piece starts off making it sound like the computer is pretty much doing all the work, while the human maybe weighs in on a matter of taste once in a while, if they like, but by the end, the list of what the LLM can actually do is really short. Implementing a sorting algorithm for you, perhaps, but not necessarily one without “egregious flaws,” and really you should still use a library for that. Replacing high-quality libraries of mature software, that have tests, etc, is obviously one of the poorer uses of vibe-slop coding.

It comes down to “adding code” that attempts to, or seems to, achieve something.

[my_throwaway23]

While I experience a very disturbing nausea, with just a healthy bit of existential dread, whenever I read whatever these AI Bros(TM) manage to... ahem, "sculpt", you actually managed to write something not immediately recognizeable as slop. Kudos.

Points deducted for the wholly unnecessary image. Text can, after all, stand on its own.

You are, however, strongly influenced by the writings of the tool covered by your musings. Might I suggest to perhaps not indulge in such excessive hyphenation?

[shiveenp]

I don’t understand the kind of mentality that takes to put out genuine slop like this. Use the LLM or the agents or the fancy way to call a markdown file a skill to do your job; but stop pretending that it makes you in any way exceptional.

The whole post says nothing, seems AI generated itself and on top of that, adds nothing of value - simply exists to increase the entropy in the world.

[7777332215]

People who were very bad 0.01x devs (or not devs at all) that now feel competent because they can produce something when previously they could produce nothing.

[kzalesak]

I, on the other hand strongly resonate with this post. I am not a programmer by profession, but a programmer by need - I write tools to get stuff done, and this is exactly the missing link. I am able to craft algorithms, architectures and focus on the UI, and llms (mostly Claude) allow me to write the low-level that needs to be written that I inspect. What used to take days takes hours and allows us to solve issue we were previously not able to in our org.

[stefan_]

Theres a lot more AI hype vendors than AI produced software anyone is actually using it seems.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

Why is it that AI glazing blog posts like this inevitably use a shitty AI generated image? I am absolutely sick to bits of seeing them

[alexwennerberg]

The text reads suspiciously like AI too. I don't X -- I Y. Short paragraphs, lots of em-dashes.

[w4yai]

Why are you sick of AI images, but you're not about stock images ?

They've equally filled the web and articles for the last years.

At least, AI images feel more on point.

[derekp7]

Honest question. For the purpose of adding a throw-away visual to help set the tone of an article, is there really any difference between shitty AI slop vs shitty Photoshop slop? Either way it is obvious that this isn't a real studio photo, and that wouldn't be expected. I guess the better (or more traditional) article picture would be a hand illustrated piece that an in-house artist would throw together in maybe an hour or two, depending on the detail and desired quality.

[andy99]

I call it “AI blindness”, people genuinely don’t see what’s bad about AI output, it happens across code, text, and images. Same as the title itself being X not Y AI slop.

[antisol]

  > I would never have written my own sorting algorithm to sort a list in the past. 

Well then I guess times haven't changed, because you still haven't written a sorting algorithm. Instead you've - at best - done a code review for one. One that based on my experience is almost certainly a shoddy, substandard implementation with the type of quality I'd be professionally embarrassed to attach my name to in a commit log.

  > I would instead rely on abstractions left for me by those with more experience.

And you'd have been better off, because now you've got the burden of maintaining a poorly-implemented sorting algorithm that you don't understand that's living in your codebase. What could possibly go wrong?

Further, those abstractions that you just threw away to roll your own encryption were written by actually talented people who actually took the time to think about their implementation before shitting it out into the world. The implementations you'll find in libaries will be superior in every way to the trash your LLM will pump out.

So, TL;DR: congratulations, you've just announced to the world that you're proud that you're a bad coder and that the software you're being paid to produce is getting worse.

Totally unrelated video I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF90rstZQ

(for those with the kind of attention span that causes them to use LLMs, maybe just skip ahead to the "this is what you sound like" section, circa 17 mins)

[rtgfhyuj]

ai slop justifications will become the norm.