I think what you're talking about is part of a much larger pattern. Autotools imagines that the most important thing is the "user" in a world where people want to download your software and build it on their machine. They don't care (as much) about fast build times, the semantic clarity of the build files themselves, the ease with which one may change or extend the build sequence, test harnesses . . . Those are all developer worries.
They do care that the code can compile on their (possibly old) machine. They do care about the ability to include some features and not others (including their ability to not have to make decisions on this if they don't want to). And they certainly want documentation that helps them to achieve their goal (which, again, is to build the software).
The newer tools make substantial inroads in making the developer's life easier. If your software is not of the sort where people download it and try to build it (because it only ships as a closed binary, is entirely internal, etc.) then maybe that makes sense. But until all these fancy gadgets start seriously caring about the use case above, I'm going to stick with autotools.
> They do care that the code can compile on their (possibly old) machine.
In my experience is it doesn't work. Sure it can be made to work and autotools asks all the right questions. However in the real world I have yet to see an autotools project that works out of the box in my custom environment.
Meanwhile cmake just worked every time when I plugged in the toolchain file that I created for the very first project I needed to build for my environment.
Again, it isn't that autotools cannot do what is claims. However nobody gets the details right and so something doesn't work. That something is different for every project. In the end what works is either what someone takes the time to make work and those things that are "very close". My project is cross compiling linux, which cmake does well (autotools also messed something up, often failing to use the sysroot paramater where needed)
I do find that "signalling expertise" is important. "I have a significant background in biblical scholarship. You can assume I've read the most important works in NT studies in particular. Do not translate Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Syriac. Now, I would like to know . . ." That changes things significantly. So does telling it you have 20+ years of experience with C programming, that you have a robust understanding of machine organization, memory layouts, embedded systems, etc.
For sure. On a personal coding project I said "I'm a professional software engineer, and while this is a hobby project I'm not just vibe-coding and want to build reliable software" and the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust.
LLMs skew toward over-focusing on things that you mention.
The reason "the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust" is because you said you "want to build reliable software".
It's not a signal of good judgment or understanding. It's just how LLM attention works.
I thought exactly the same at first. But then i wondered if that still holds true with today's advanced thinking, RLHF involved, frontier models. I guess to a certain extend it did indeed behave better, as a reaction to his self description into account.
EDIT: I mean, those systems accumulated so much complexity around the attention based next token predictor.
Training the LLM to do things that the user didn’t explicitly ask for is a good way to get complaints from the users. Doesn’t matter if those things are best practices.
this feels like "make no mistakes" level of prompting. reliable software isn't as simple as making it reliable, it's about choosing the trade-offs in the areas that don't matter as much as the areas that do. if you keep prompting the LLM to make your software more robust it will keep giving you things to do. they aren't all good things. eventually you'll end up needing kubernetes to run a calculator app.
I absolutely understand what you're saying. It makes complete sense. But I will never, ever shake the sense that software that isn't as fast as possible is offensive, immoral, delinquent -- the result of sloth, lassitude, lack of imagination, and a general hostility toward our noble Art.
"Fast enough" will always bug me. "Still ahead of network latency" will always sound like the dog ate your homework. I understand the perils of premature optimization, but not a refusal to optimize.
I'll put TB Barricade against Pro-L 2 and TB Reverb against Pro-R for sure. I mostly use other stuff for EQ and compression, but those two are really very similar to the FB offerings.
Really. It amazes me that I still find out about new Linux plugins after years of producing music on the platform. It could not have been easy to compile this; the information is all over the place online.
The ability to filter (!) for compression, saturation, etc. is so great.
Author, here. This is exactly the question I was trying (perhaps ineptly) to pose: If we designed a programming language with the idea that it would be primarily or exclusively vibe coded, what would that language look like? Might it look something more like Lean? Or more like theorem provers in general? Or would it look more like a natural language PL (think Inform 7)? Or what about a heavily declarative DSL like FAUST (for audio DSP)?
None of our existing programming languages were designed for quite the circumstance in which contemporary programming now finds itself; they all address an ergonomic situation in which there are humans and machines (not humans, machines, and LLMs).
It's possible, I suppose that the only PL that makes sense here is the one the LLMs "knows" best, but I sort of doubt that that makes sense over the long term. And I'm repeating myself, but really, it seems to me that a language that was written entirely for the ergonomic situation of human coders without any consideration of LLMs is not addressing the contemporary situation. This is not a precise analogy, but it seems to me a little like the difference between a language that was designed before vs after multicore -- or before vs after the internet.
The problem with creating a programming language for LLMs, goes back to, what are LLMs? They are trained on masses of human written code, that is written in human readable form.
So even if you make a better programming language for a LLM, it has nothing to train on. Unless we start to transcode human language code to the LLM code.
Are the vectors/tokens/whatever, not already LLM code at this point? Technically, LLMs not are doing what Haxe was doing (haxe.org) but in a more advanced form?
Even if we make a more LLM like programming code, in a sense, we are just making another code that needs to be translated into the tokens that consist in a LLM model, no?
Feels like we are starting to hit philosophical debates with that one lol
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.
Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
I keep hearing this, but I fail to see why "the massive, well-maintained set of critical libraries upon which UNIX is based" is not a good reason to use C in 2025.
I have never seen a language with a better ffi into C than C.
Truly, one of the most original artists of our time. I am among those who think Einstein on the Beach is one of the greatest theatrical works of the twentieth century, but I don't think I ever saw a Wilson piece that didn't completely blow my mind.
I seem to recall an interview in which he said that he didn't think many of his works should be revived. I hope that's not true, and that his pieces have a long life in repertory.
They do care that the code can compile on their (possibly old) machine. They do care about the ability to include some features and not others (including their ability to not have to make decisions on this if they don't want to). And they certainly want documentation that helps them to achieve their goal (which, again, is to build the software).
The newer tools make substantial inroads in making the developer's life easier. If your software is not of the sort where people download it and try to build it (because it only ships as a closed binary, is entirely internal, etc.) then maybe that makes sense. But until all these fancy gadgets start seriously caring about the use case above, I'm going to stick with autotools.