I've been programming now for over fifty years. I'll also say that I'm using vibe coding for personal projects. So far, I'm getting good results. Here are some tips:

1. Know what you're doing. Right now, I'm working on an interpreter for a DSL. But I already know the basic structure of interpreters. I can tell when the code the AI is turning out is good or bad. When it's bad, I tell it what's good and ask it to correct the bad code. This usually works.

2. Vibe code in small chunks. I didn't say code the interpreter and here's the syntax. I coded it piece by piece - language primitives, environment structure, control flow primitives, etc. Each step of the way I checked the output to make sure it was what I wanted.

3. Let it write tests. Again, AI's are pretty good at looking at a piece of well-written code and building tests for it. If you point out corner cases you want tested, it will crank those out pretty well.

4. Show it what you want. If you want a particular style in the code, let it know. It will follow that extremely well.

5. Use it for boilerplate. Let's say I have five primitive types in my language. I work with the AI to generate the first one. Then I say "Do the same thing for these other four primitives". AI works well off examples, so give it some.

AI works pretty well if you know what you're doing and how to use it. I think of it as a relatively diligent junior coder. And it works about that well.

I'd be more worried about zero day workweeks brought about by AI.

I mean, it depends on exactly how fast the water is moving (as well as how deep it is; both things matter). If we're talking normal river current (say, 1 foot per second), most adults can stand in eighteen inches and be fine, if it doesn't catch them off guard. If the current is faster, then it doesn't have to be as deep to have essentially the same effect, or if it's deeper, it doesn't have to be as fast.

There are of course some caveats to the above. One is, once you get past about 4-5 feet deep (depending on the person), you're floating or swimming anyway, so additional depth doesn't matter very much at that point; but additional velocity still makes a difference.

Oh, forgot to mention I'm from the Midwest. There's no room in the garage for a _car_ of all things, haha, that would be ridiculous. No, the garage is where we keep the garage stuff. You know, the lawn mower, snow blower, garden tools, step ladder, extension ladder, bicycles, sawhorses, sports gear, extra bricks left over from when the patio was put in, spare pieces of plywood, hedge trimmers, mattocks, old paint buckets, hula hoops, bungee cords, antifreeze, grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, and so on and so forth. There are four people in this household, so the garage is pretty much full. It think there might be a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor out there.

Why are you trying to get new programmers to write code? Isn't vibe coding supposed to be taking over that niche? I'm not sure if I'm serious or not, but it seems a valid question in this day and she.

Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Am I the only person on the planet who still opens the garage door with, you know, my hands? Is that completely crazy? Am *I* crazy?

The general dearth of atmosphere, is the main thing that would be holding Mars back from having any really substantial weather phenomena, including lightning like we see on Earth. But apparently there is just about enough atmosphere to support... this version of it.

New math isn't the problem -- new math was never the problem. Standards are the problem.

You do realize the young people aren't choosing their own education, right? Its the previous generations making those changes.

You're likely falling into the logical thinking word problem portion of those students.

> I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude
> just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

Yeah, the problem is the school administration doesn't believe in it, so they undermine you. For example, if you send a misbehaving kid to the office for discipline, they'll generally be given candy or other treats. Yes, really. Every time. Which means every kid who has ever been sent to the office for bad behavior, is going to misbehave again and again, hoping to achieve similar results.

And you *absolutely* cannot punish them yourself; that would end your teaching career.

No, I'm not making any of this up. My sister is an elementary school teacher.

Honestly, at this point I think their population is closer to three times ours; though it's impossible to be precise at all, because death statistics are as illegal to report in mainland China, as any other politically sensitive thing.

We know for certain that their birth rate has been lower than one-child-per-woman and falling for the last couple of decades (and given their demographics -- most of the population being well past child bearing age for a woman -- this definitely implies that the population of domestically-born Chinese people has been shrinking), and we also know for sure that an abnormally large number of deaths went unreported or grossly under-reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022. (We've got satellite images of the backlog stacked up outside of crematoria for months at a time, and needless to say there's nothing in the official stats to correspond to that.) As for immigrants, expats have been leaving China like rats off a sinking ship for the last half decade or so. Estimates of the current population vary wildly; I've seen figures as low as half a billion, and as high as 1.5 billion; but realistically, I think on the one hand it's clear that there's been a significant decline, and on the other hand it's also clear that China is still significantly more densely populated than America. On the whole, I estimate that their population is about three times ours, give or take. And continuing to decline.

Whether this decline is altogether a bad thing (for China, I mean), is another topic for another day.

I don't know about the count of solar panels, but I don't need to, because it's a side issue.

Fundamentally, the article is abusing purchasing power parity, when talking about the size of the entire economy, to make it sound like China's economy is actually comparable to America's. That's *incredibly* intellectually dishonest. Purchasing power parity GDP is only meaningful, at all, when you're looking at per-capita numbers, because in that context it is a proxy for average standard of living. (Even then, _median_ income, adjusted for purchasing power parity, is a much better proxy than GDP PPP, especially in countries with a stupidly extreme wealth gap, like China.) When you're talking about the total size of an economy, as a proxy for the resources and economic power that it can bring to bear, purchasing power is entirely irrelevant, and bringing it up is absolute proof that the writer either does not understand economics at all, or else is deliberately attempting to deceive the reader. Or both.

The article is absolutely propaganda, and furthermore it's _stupid_ propaganda that no educated person should fall for.