> Feel free to replace “the author” below with “a hypothetical author who could have created the same thing”.

This is honestly sleazy, just admit you were basically way off.

The code itself is the most compact representation of the rules you want applied.

Very off-topic, but the 'humans write “laws”' phrasing made me think of using LLMs to unit test real laws. Have them come up with test cases to see if the phrasing is as intended or has loopholes. Wonder if anyone's tried doing something like this (probably not, I imagine this is too much tech for government)

As a resident of Bend, Oregon, checking the homepage sets off some kind of "oh look, Bend!" alarm in my brain.

> The problem is that vibe coding makes it possible to build a substantial solution before learning enough about the problem to recognise that a much better solution exists

As a software developer we should fear chasing "better" solutions, that path always lead to procrastination, "kitchen sink" and probably not what users wants. "Good enough" should suffice in most cases. Sure if you are building a super mega critical software to land a plane or something like that, is different. But every day software, shouldn't be treated like "carved in stone" and stuff that should last a 1000 years. Code can be cheap now (calling it "vibe coding" doesn't help).

You can create or modify something quite fast now. Better to focus on testing, documentation, making sure that software will do what is expected.

"If you ask a LLM for a language where it’s possible to prove that a function is formally correct by building up a proof from basic principles then it will happily do so, it will never stop to suggest to you that computers can already build complex proofs without the need for a LLM and eliminate 99% of the work. It will never tell you that what you’re building already mostly exists as work that you can build on."

I don't know what llm you use but current llms will definitely let you know about similar things out there. So this statement is a bit incorrect.

The vibe coding dunning krueger damage has yet to surface, but I'm guessing it will be in the billions. I'm not even talking about the insane infrastructure investments - thousands of c suite execs are vibe coding pointless crap instead of delegating it to their team that knows what they are doing, wasting thousands on tokens if they are on enterprise API plans for zero return or spending 30$ on creating an interactive html page for stuff that should be a power point slide with a few bullet points. It's totally insane!

I feel like this is the same black hole as small local models.

Things people want to be awesome and true, and things that are actually awesome and true don't intersect the way people want them to.

…so if there was an easy way to do provably correct AI code, it would be nice.

…but I’d also like a frontier that runs on my raspberry pi and a cheap fully autonomous self driving car that just uses a single cell phone camera.

Unfortunately wanting those doesn't make them exist; and people telling you they do exist usually are either a) uninformed, or b) selling something.

It seems like this is largely a matter of what you’re asking for. If you wanted to do more research into the state of the field, an AI might be pretty good at answering your questions.