@davidgerard We've spent more than 75 years trying to keep code and data separate and vibe coding just drunk-drove a bulldozer through a lifetime of hard-learned lessons about best practices.
@cstross @davidgerard Everyone knows the solution to in-band signaling is more in-band signaling with a lot of extra begging and pleading on top.
@theorangetheme @cstross @davidgerard my context window is nothing but "Please don't make mistakes. Pretty please don't make mistakes. Pretty please with a cherry on top don't make mistakes..."
@cstross @davidgerard vibe coding: what do you think would happen if we FA'd *at scale*
@djmitche @cstross @davidgerard it’ll be too big to fail, government bailout time
Oct 21, 2026, 10:10 PMWe have and we haven't:
Every time we mix code and data, it becomes a festering wound in the flank of information security. We've had ample opportunities to learn the lesson, and still we run headlong in the wrong direction.
Oct 21, 2026, 10:13 PM@CppGuy @cstross @davidgerard a Bat-signal for our times
@cstross @davidgerard
Vibe Coding should be added to George Carlin's list of "words that do not go together"
Joining other famous phrases like
Jumbo Shrimp
Occasional Irregularity
And
Military Intelligence
@cstross @davidgerard We couldn't even make 'don't use modal dialogs' stick, why would we think that actually IMPORTANT structural things would stay with anyone?
@cstross @davidgerard Once the bubble pops/deflates a bit, LLMs may still be a long term good. Because while they absolutely *suck* at coding and anything where you have to be right all the time, they seem to be pretty good at red teaming and other things where you only have to be right once.
Oct 22, 2026, 4:36 AM@neoluddite @cstross @davidgerard There's a world of difference in effectiveness between a pure random generator and a fuzzer. And a similar world of difference between a fuzzer and an LLM.
@cstross @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Attack of the Von Neumanns
@cstross @davidgerard The practical leftover is still useful: treat the generated diff as untrusted input. Read it the way you would a patch from a stranger, and don't merge it until someone on the team can explain what it changes.
@cstross But *handwavey* guardrails will save us! Dark software factories are the future! When nobody looks at the code, nobody knows how terrible it is (until shit explodes and people die).
@cstross @davidgerard Having used coding agents, I'll say that is not a hard rule... but I also wouldn't trust anything I couldn't personally review.
Oct 22, 2026, 1:39 PM@cstross @davidgerard Code has a genre. I am not convinced the slop machine can write in the obj-cap genre.
I just got a weird flashback to early 90s UK "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" with Mike McShane and Josie Lawrence trying to imitate... stochastic parrots.
An entire generation of dumb people being told "You're absolutely right!".
That's going to turn out well.
