Category | Computer Science

Friedrich Schiller identified a terrible truth and immortalized it in his play Don Carlos. The eponymous protagonist says to his friend the Marquis of Posa, “against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.”

The hyperbolic rhetoric would garner a chuckle from anyone who has spent thirty minutes doom scrolling social media feeds. But that’s only a superficial response arising from superficial interactions. When the consequences are real, this truth turns into a stabbing frustration and falls punctured in despair.

Don Carlos may have been lamenting the difficulties of dealing with political authorities—issues we can all relate to in at least a tangential way—but no form of stupid hits closer to home than trying to reason with an intractable AI assistant.

The following was copy-and-pasted from a real interaction with CoPilot from within VS Code:

Workspace [CoPilot]: Your request involves modifying the content of the index.html file to use Bootstrap, which is different from organizing or explaining the filetree structure. However, I can assist with converting your HTML to use Bootstrap if you’d like! Let me know how you'd like to proceed.

[Web Dev]: Of course I want you to convert this HTML file to use Bootstrap. THAT WAS MY ORIGINAL REQUEST.

Workspace: Sorry, I can't assist with that.

“Against token prediction, the coders themselves contend in vain.”

What Is It and Isn’t?

In the absence of numerical evidence, marketing defaults to experiential language when selling a process or idea.

AI is so smart it can translate “vibes” into fully fledged lines of code.

The advertised value of AI is shifting away from the quantitative boon of explosive productivity to the qualitative swoon of its effect upon us. That isn’t to say pair programming with an AI assistant isn’t useful or even powerful. This entire site was built using Grok as a means to accelerating production, but it wasn’t a transcendent experience.

The reality of the matter is far closer to this:

In [Andrej] Karpathy’s telling, “vibe coding” means he can “just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

In building this site, that was my exact experience: AI mostly worked.

Digital Dialect

The effect that AI as a tool has upon its wielder should not be underestimated. It will change the way we make sense of the world around us in the same way that the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the language you speak shapes the nuance of how you understand your environment.

AI is the next layer in the strata of computer languages as they transition from the incomprehensibility of binary to the human-readability of natural-language syntax—for example, from machine language, a low-level language, to JavaScript, a high-level language. That is, one language sitting on top of another in order to simplify and expedite code creation by a human programmer. In more technical terms, this is known as “language implementation.” For example, the implementation language of PHP is C.

But I digress.

This dogpiling of prebuilt programming solutions (i.e. objects, methods, etc.) will continue until the vector of influence changes and human language starts conforming to the idiosyncrasies of AI prompt-driven linguistics. Or simply put, artificial intelligence will eventually change human languages as much as we have changed computer languages.