I’m torn on “is this the future”.

I worked all day on a Phoenix app we’re developing for ag irrigation analysis. Of late, my “let’s see what $20/mo gets you” is Zed with its genetic offerings.

It actually writes very little Elixir code for me. Sometimes, I let it have a go, but mostly I end up rewriting that stuff. Elixir is fun, and using the programming model as intended is enlightening.

What I do direct it to write a lot is a huge amount of the HEEX stuff for me. With an eventual pass over and clean it up for me. I have not memorized all of the nuances of CSS and html. I do not want to. And writing it has got to be the worst syntactic experience in the history of programming. It’s like someone said people lisp was cool; rather than just gobs of nested parentheses, let’s double, nay triple, no quadruple down on that. We’ll bracket all our statements/elements with a PAIR of hard to type characters, and for funsies, we’ll make them out different words in there. And then when it came to years of how to express lists of things, it’s like someone said “gimme a little bit of ini, case insensitivity, etc”. And every year, we’ll publish new spec of new stuff that preserves the old while adding the new. I digress…

I view agentic coding as an indictment on how bad programming has gotten. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be value, but a huge amount of the appeal, is that web tech is like legalese filled with what are probably hidden bugs that are swallowed by browsers in a variety of u predictable ways. What a surprise that we’ve given up and decided the key tools do the probabilistic right thing. It’s not like we had a better chance of being any more correctly precise on our own anyway.