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Comments (78)

• gwern
  Naturally, when hobbyists spend a lot of time in a single block to get results (as they are unable to parallelize or meaningfully coordinate over multiple invocations of themselves, due to lacking key cognitive capabilities such as embeddings), they refer to it as 'going ape'.
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  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?
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  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?
• lateforwork
  > The central view of ape coding proponents was that software engineered by AIs did not match the reliability of software engineered by humansThat's not the reason to do ape coding. AI generated code is not innovative. If you want to build something that no one has built anything similar to then you have to ape code.See Chris Lattner's blog where he explains the limitations of AI: https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...
• umairnadeem123
  NGL the flaw in this piece is the same flaw in every "AI will replace X" argument - it assumes the bottleneck was ever the typing.it wasn't. the bottleneck is knowing what to build and why.I use AI agents for probably 80% of my code output now and IMO i'm more productive than ever, but only because i spent years "ape coding" first and can immediately tell when the agent is heading somewhere stupid. the people i see struggling with AI coding are exactly the ones who skipped that part. tbf the calculator analogy that keeps coming up in this thread is backwards - nobody is arguing you don't need to understand math to use a calculator. that's literally the point. you DO need to understand it, which is why "ape coding" isn't going away as some niche hobby.it's the prerequisite
• 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.”
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  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.
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  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.
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  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.
• 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.
• philipallstar
  I think this is going to be very prescient! Just as Baristas died out once we got machines that could make coffee from powders.
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  amelius
  So we are apes now?It's so great to be alive in this time of of dehumanizing AI.
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  ghm2199
  I would call it code-plumber. It's like a plumber who are today socio-economocally very distinct from architects, civil and structural engineers.They will have very narrow to zero understanding — don't need it to fix — of shear forces, navier stokes.They will command high rates if labor is limited(a plumber in Indonesia will commande lower ppp adjusted hourly rates than America). CS education become a subset of applied math since graduate hiring of code-plumber will require a narrower certificate to fix an AI system — which works very much like how plumber working to fix a building leak is different from a person fixing a water pipe burst under a road.A few AI systems will become dominant, That should be a mix of Anthropics and your Googles. They will hire code plumbers to plumb together all the things they provide.You don't have to use much brain at all as a code-plumber. You become a remote journeyman logging in and plumbing with given tools, making sure there is low back pressure(a term where load on future plumbers interacting/fixing with ai decreases) and the like.
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  thorum
  Ape thinking is a cognitive practice where a human deliberately solves problems with their own mind. Practitioners of ape thinking will typically author thoughts by thinking them with their own brain, using neurons and synapses.The term was popularized when asking a computer to do it for you became the dominant form of cognition. "Ape thinking" first appeared in online communities as derogatory slang, referring to humans who were unable to outsource all their thinking to a computer. Despite the quick spread of asking a computer to do it for you, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human complacency were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology.
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  g9yuayon
  I like the Chinese alternative better: 古法编程. It feels like playful self-deprecation, suggesting old-school, handcrafted coding with a wink.Ape coding sounds harsher and more insulting, implying mindless or sloppy work rather than humor.
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  patrickmay
  If you're selling Ape Coding merchandise, send me the link!
• 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.
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  theusus
  AI can produce thousands of line of code. But that’s not the goal.
• effdee
  I prefer the term "classic coding".
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  Dansvidania
  i don't understand the stance of the post and it being the first in the blog (congrats on getting this hot on your first post) I am unable to further investigate.Is it sci-fi like writing from the perspective of a future person?It sounds like someone trying to make assumption sounds as fact. Not a fan.
• shepherdjerred
  I think this piece makes an excellent point.Maybe the LLMs today are deeply flawed and cannot replace programmers. But, one day, LLMs (or some other AI approach) _will_ be successful in replacing programmers. It might not be this year or the year after.I do however feel pretty confident in saying that there will be few programmers in 2076. This piece will look quite prescient.It's just like how we say "can you imagine programming on a punchcard?"
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  hparadiz
  If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.
• yomismoaqui
  So, are we doing fan-fiction now?
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  blurbleblurble
  Who's still here in 2026
• BrianDGLS92
  > Everything in this website was written by a human
• YarickR2
  Every joke has a bit of a joke, as they say. I'm proudly ape-coding two of my current projects.
• layer8
  Arguably, it’s the LLMs that are doing the aping, and hence the ape-coding.In that picture, aping is probably a step up from stochastic parroting.
• raxskle
  The merits and demerits of this product vary from person to person, and I dare not make a definite assertion
• 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"
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  g-b-r
  This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots.It should be flagged and taken down.
• 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.
• tshaddox
  I’m a fan of the term “human slop,” which I’ve seen pop up recently regarding certain tech company feuds on Twitter.
• throwaway613746
  [dead]
• g-b-r
  [flagged]
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  serious_angel
  [flagged]
• 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.
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  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.
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  ncr100
  Anyone else bothered by ape being overwhelmingly derogatorily slang for black people?Seems like it's a doubly offensive term.Are there better terms, less encumbered by bigotry, while still covering the "meat space" quality to this development approach?