Ape Coding [fiction]

gas9S9zw3P9c

"Humans are now writing code in strict specification language so that AI agents have completely context and don't mistakes. This specification language is called C' and has led to a whopping 20% reduction of code. 1000 of C++ code can be expressed in no more than 800 lines of specification C' code written by humans"

hanifbbz

WTF is this?! Sattire? AI generated propaganda? I honestly don't get it. Can OP elaborate why it's a good content worthy of people’s time? Thanks in advance.

raxskle

The merits and demerits of this product vary from person to person, and I dare not make a definite assertion

the__alchemist

> “Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. > “By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said. > “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.” “Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked. “Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride. “You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”

YarickR2

Every joke has a bit of a joke, as they say. I'm proudly ape-coding two of my current projects.

delichon

I am ape writing this post after ape cooking breakfast, and then I'll go for an ape walk. In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of that and relax.

patrickmay

If you're selling Ape Coding merchandise, send me the link!

lyu07282

Why has nobody mentioned yet how dangerous this really is? Have we all forgotten the great Datacenter burnings of 2031? The APEs are one step away from becoming fully fledged Luddite terrorists. Artisanal software is unamerican just like President Barron said the other day on his Twitch stream.

hparadiz

If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.

tshaddox

I’m a fan of the term “human slop,” which I’ve seen pop up recently regarding certain tech company feuds on Twitter.

theusus

AI can produce thousands of line of code. But that’s not the goal.

msteffen

I liked this a lot in retrospect. I really like to understand the practice of software engineering by analogy to research mathematics (like, no one ever asks mathematicians to estimate how long it will take to prove something…). Something I think software engineers can take from math right now: years of everyone’s math education is spent doing things that computers have always been able to do trivially—arithmetic, solving simple equations, writing proofs that would just be `simp` in Lean—and no one wrings their hands over it. It’s an accepted part of the learning process.

amelius

So we are apes now? It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.

pbohun

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages. We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require dozens of pages of natural language to describe the same thing.

avaer

"Aping in" in crypto means (meant?) buying crypto without doing any research. I know it's not what the thought piece is about, but it's equally accurate to say engineers are "aping in" on AI coding without doing any research. Very much the same vibe, my anti-AI friends suddenly flipped their tune to shill slopped together apps. I expect it to go about as well as it did in crypto.

blurbleblurble

Who's still here in 2026

andai

I call it Tradcoding. Not using AI for anything. (You just copy-paste from StackOverflow, as our forefathers once did ;) I also have two levels "beneath" vibe coding: - Power Coding: Like power armor, you describe chunks of code in English and it's built. Here you outsource syntax and stdlib, but remain in control of architecture and data flow. - Backseat Coding: Like vibe coding but you keep peeking at the code and complaining ;) - Vibe Coding: Total yolo mode. What's a code?

samoit

I always thought that ape coding is what we call vibe-coding nowadays. Maybe the write of the article (maybe an ai generated blog?) misunderstood the terms.

jayd16

It's pretty strange to me that we imagine a world where AI can handle every problem but we still talk about code. It's like how the Jetson's had bulky TVs. You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. We don't say "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the entire concept fades to the back.

djha-skin

I would probably just call it hand coding , as we say we use hand tools in wood working. Many do this for fun, but knowing the hand tools also makes you a better woodworker. It's an interesting question: Will coding turn out to be more like landscaping, where (referring to the practice specifically of cutting grass) no one uses hand tools (to a first approximation)? Or it will it be more like woodworking, where everyone at least knows where a Stanley hand plane is in their work shop?