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sue

@[email protected]

🎏 Writes code to help other folk learn to write code

🏊🏻‍♀️ Swimmer
🃏 Clown
🪩 Lefty smartarse
💅🏻 Still petty after cancer

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@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

I don't know about you but I don't think the frenzy of panic induced ai generated prototypes that don't go anywhere because no one knows how to make them into an actual thing is particularly sustainable lolol fucking hell make it stop

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

"The specification language gets more precise over time, because natural language is ambiguous and different models interpret the same prompt differently. You add more structure. You define exact function signatures. You specify return types. You nail down error handling behavior with enough precision that two different models should produce interchangeable output. The specification starts looking less like English prose and more like a programming language."

https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/30/will-ai-make-package-managers-redundant.html

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random
@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

On the viral tweet about claude generating in an hour what a team at google had apparently built in a year, the OP provided more context which.. of course it was a misrepresentation of what had actually happened

@rakyll To cut through the noise on this topic, it's helpful to provide more more context: - We have built several versions of this system last year. - There are tradeoffs and there hasn't been a clear winner. - When prompted with the best ideas that survived, coding agents are able to go very far and generate a good decent toy version in an hour or so.
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@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

I had a cat who hated the smell of an air freshener we had, but would deliberately go up and smell it every time he was near it, just to verify how appalling it was and be annoyed by it all over again. Well, that's how a lot of people appear to use social media.

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

I mentioned on bluesky that several friends use LLMs to automate bureaucratic crap in their day jobs, and I get a guy confidently explaining that they clearly can't tell the difference between what matters and what doesn't.. These are mostly folk who work in non profits and public sector orgs, who do important work for low pay, and are automating timewasting, energy sapping nonsense to let them focus on the shit they actually care about, but this eejit is comfortable in his moral superiority.

sue OP ,
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Aside from everything else, if you actually want to persuade people to stop using LLMs, you need to start by trying to understand why they are using these technologies. Otherwise I have to conclude you don't want to influence change so much as judge folk because it makes you feel better about yourself.

sue OP ,
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I've managed to bring about a small amount of change in organisational behaviour over the years, certainly more than my level of seniority would lead you to suspect was feasible. In every single case I've done it by starting with conversations to ask why things are the way they are and taking a non-judgemental approach. You have to meet people where they are and assume there are things about their experiences that you don't know.

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

I sometimes see people describing resistance to LLM assisted coding as gatekeeping and I get that, software engineering culture is absolutely rife with gatekeeping, I quite literally dedicated dedicated my career to developer education because I want more people to have access to these opportunities.

But here's the thing, in order to fully participate in the world of software you will still need to learn to code, giving people the impression that isn't the case is not empowering.

sue OP ,
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We also have an obligation to mitigate the harms software systems can cause, and to manage accountability. That also depends on people understanding code.

More code in the world is going to require more people with coding skills, gen AI makes it more urgent that we teach coding.

sue OP ,
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My less popular opinion is that LLM assisted coding can also be part of a pathway to accessing those opportunities, but not by having the human avoid the code!

sue OP ,
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Over on bluesky where the conversation is a lot more heated I've seen folk telling engineering leads they're being unfair in expecting contributors to understand the code in a commit before it can be merged.. That is a recipe for harm without accountability.

sue OP ,
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Determining what it means to understand a code commit is also complex! Especially in a world of dependencies.. But to me this is an opportunity to get better at coming up with these definitions.

sue OP ,
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I think the basis for this misunderstanding is the belief that LLMs are a new abstraction for coding, but as I've said before I think that is totally wrong framing here. Code generation does not equal a programming abstraction.

sue OP ,
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The replies to this are something else. To be clear, I do not perceive coding as some sort of special ability that makes the bearer exceptional in some way lol. The mystification of this field is part of a tremendous gatekeeping effort.

What's important to me is who has access to the opportunities that are associated with this skillset / who has paths to acquiring it, and the harms that can be caused in exercising it. I'm primarily trying to explore how LLMs affect these things.

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

I keep seeing the idea that English is the next programming language and it's making me think there's a kind of inversion of how we think of coding skills and abstraction. I'd say that in order to express the necessary information in an English language specification you currently need experience writing code at a decent level. Doing it successfully in English isn't easier, it's harder. If we want people without coding skills to be able to do that we first need to teach them coding.

sue OP ,
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I want to dig into this belief that it's actually harder to do at the higher abstraction level. I need to think more about it but I suspect writing the code is part of how we come to understand systems we're working on at a higher level.

The raspberry pi foundation work on semantic waves speaks to the varying of abstraction levels in learning, that might be helpful here.

sue OP ,
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Being in any specific natural or programming language doesn't inherently make a task more accessible, more people can write English than coding languages sure, but writing English with what specific purpose.. Certain tasks are easier and harder in specific coding languages, whether you write the language is really a small piece of the puzzle

sue OP ,
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Someone shared this with me from Dijkstra

"The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid."

https://raboof.github.io/ewd/EWD667.html

sue OP ,
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In natural language ambiguity / nuance is a feature not a bug, that's essential for the collective and continuous negotiation of shared meaning we do as human beings, but it's a huge problem in a programming language..

sue OP ,
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In order to use natural language successfully to generate programs I think the user needs to know (or guess) more about how the translation works and how the implementation might work than when the interface is well defined, as it is in an effective higher level coding language..

sue OP ,
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Anyone who believes natural language can be reliably clear for consistent interpretation should spend more time on social media lolol

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

My conviction that most LLM coding tooling is aimed at avoiding learning rather than enabling it just keeps getting stronger. Today I'm looking at debugging tools for LLM generated code and you'll never guess what everything I'm finding uses, why it's more LLMs of course. 🤡

sue OP ,
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When I did my masters in software development, the final part was extending a real world software project. I was dismayed to discover that I had to spend a load of time fixing bugs before I could work on my extension.. Of course the bug fixing turned out to be the single most valuable piece of learning I did on that course.

Using automation to avoid what you learn about a system by debugging it is extremely self defeating if you plan on trying to develop and grow that system in any way imo.

sue OP ,
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Thinking about this today from the perspective of the no code tools that preceded the LLM ones, in my experience there was an acceptance that at some point people would need/want to crack open the box and get into the source code, because your abstraction had limitations, so it's interesting how much of the response to debugging vibe coded apps seems to be "throw more automation at it"

Not that there isn't a place for automation, but the avoidance of supporting digging into the code is extreme

sue OP ,
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No code solutions tended to be more upfront about the fact that you could use them so solve a specific set of problems, they essentially provided components for particular use cases, so the abstractions were more transparent.. I suspect vibe coding platforms will ultimately need to embrace that mindset too and will retreat from the suggestion that you can use them to generate code for literally anything

sue OP ,
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As they move through the phases of business shenanigans their sales and marketing functions will want them to target "verticals" and all that which I think will inevitably lead them in this direction anyway, if they survive long enough to withstand the churn

sue OP ,
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tbh I don't think there's much risk of funding vanishing because people who invest in tech are so beholden to the promise of undermining labour that they believe this stuff will deliver

sue OP ,
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It is ideological like so much of vc funded tech, real world business utility is a small piece of the puzzle when you look at what these folk tend to invest in

sue OP ,
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The evergreen proof of this is that you almost never see startups focused on spreadsheets lol

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

So close to getting it

r/artificial 144m Why is the industry building Agents in IDEs? Discussion I think we should be focusing on fine tuned LLMs rather than IDEs and browsers to help us 'work'. If the Al overlords are aiming to replace coding languages with English, why bother investing in IDEs like cursor... sure they are useful, but are they really worth hyping up so much when eventually the need for IDEs, ie, developers is going to go away...
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@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

Hate to see you go but love to watch you leaf amirite

Red Japanese Maple tree losing its leaves
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@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

Started reading Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness as part of my attempt to process the protestant work ethic aspect of how people talk about users of gen AI

"The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of some-thing else, and never for its own sake."

Book cover for Russell In Praise of Idleness with smoking pipes on it
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@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

"I vibe coded enterprise grade software in four days"

I'm gonnae go out on a limb and say naw, ye didnae

The primary reason such software normally takes longer than this isn't because the programmers can't type fast enough ffs

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

A post on another platform where someone has a "stronger than cancer" t-shirt on because they've survived it and I... other people don't die from cancer because they are not strong enough, tae fuck with this shite

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

I think a lot about how I was able to escape poverty in part because my education equipped me with the ability to communicate in acceptable ways and assimilate in certain environments.

If folk are using AI to generate language in standard forms of English because they don't come from a background that affords them that..

There are many paths to opportunity that require the submission of some linguistic asset that meets requirements that basically perform a gatekeeping function.

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

The only movie hacker

Richard Pryor in Superman III

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

DHH going full mask off racist is a good time for a reminder that him and his wee pal wrote all that organisational management 💩thought leadership💩 based on running a company with a few dozen employees and is basically the manager of your local supermarket posting on facebook about how you can't say anything these days

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

Something that really annoys me with text editing apps that give you intrusive suggestions as you type (AI or other) is that a lot of the time the writing is part of my thought process. The goal is more complex than getting the words on the page, it's part of me figuring the thing out and these prompts interfere with that, aggressively so. 🤬

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

People continuing to have arguments in the replies to a popular post days later are like the houseguests that ended up staying several nights longer than anticipated this christmas, except I invited them...

sue OP ,
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@JessTheUnstill yeah I think I need to learn to just mute, I find it hard not to keep an eye on it for some daft reason

sue OP ,
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@JessTheUnstill Totally, it's usually gone so off track by that stage it's almost unrelated to the post lol

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

Nothing to make you marvel at the wonders of technology like a massive cookie consent dialog ON THE TELLY 🤡💩

A TV set with "we care about your privacy" etc etc and buttons to accept, manage, view partners, blocking the entire screen
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sue OP ,
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A reminder that obnoxious, blocking cookie consent banners are not required by law but are there because tech companies had a massive tantrum at being prevented from tracking the bejesus out of you by default.. They don't need to be annoying or intrusive, companies can absolutely choose not to track, to track less, or make the consent experience easier, they choose not to 💩💩💩

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

Not linking directly because I don't want to shit on projects I believe are genuinely trying to make the web better, but every time I see a post about "the small web" or a more "humane" web or whatever that includes phrases like this about content: "created without the motivation of financial gain" I sigh so deeply lol

I am begging ethical web enthusiasts to understand what an extreme privilege it is to spend time working on something without worrying about money

@sue@glasgow.social avatar sue , to random

As the token poor kid who got to go to uni I can assure you the idea that policies like affirmative action lower standards is extremely hilarious. You want to see low standards? Surround yourself with the privileged LOL