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AI writes great code for people who memorized PIE while gaming a FAANG interview.

For those of us who aspire to cognition over memorization, I hope we can find a smarter pairs programmer than AI.

Fortunately, I've paired with a few, all of whom were vastly smarter than I'll ever be.

Your aspiration may arrive in the form of a hybrid:

A hybrid that takes form by mixing:

* a page from the DSL playbook: small pieces, loosely joined by organizational context,

* a page from the "code as comment" playbook where the best DSL is a real programming language that signifies not metaprogramming, but pseudocode, or the lack of comment

* a page from Knuth's literate programming book

I'm not sure what comes out the other end of the machine when you put those ideas together but it's likely beyond AI and python: perhaps lua written by Knuth.

What's really missing is a shorthand for the volley of human pairs programming, a gateway drug for human-computer sensemaking collaboration that enables us to go "volley: what you've got is good, but great would be more concise", essentially a tiny language of bidirectional interaction where most AI conversations go awry given their need for verbosity: exactly the thing wrong with PIE's dominance of the FAANG interview's emergent industry: becoming turbo tax's more subtle sister.

I'm not sure if there's an HCI lab studying pairs programming, but I only live a few miles from one of the best.

Take Szasz second sin and rewrite it for software.




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