Kevin Riggle
kevinr.free-dissociation.com
Kevin Riggle
@kevinr.free-dissociation.com
Principal @ http://complexsystems.group. I keep people safe on the internet (trying). Looking at the world with an “anarchist squint” 🏳️‍🌈 @ kevinriggle@ioc.exchange
Oh yes. Enough turkey soup, frozen, to last the rest of the year
December 30, 2025 at 7:47 PM
I think I would need to hire someone to post there for me
December 30, 2025 at 7:41 PM
I just absolutely cannot with that place
December 30, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Even without vibe coding there’s always the temptation to make the second system so toweringly abstract in order to account for every edge case discovered in the first system that it collapses under its own weight before serving a single hello world query
December 30, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Haha yeah I know :D
December 30, 2025 at 7:12 PM
-> everyone else is stuck maintaining the first system
December 30, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Kevin Riggle
The extra fun part was where it was supposed to analyze classified data and I didn't have clearance, so I could feed it the data but not know if the results were correct or even made sense.
Made debugging super-fun.

I think a future of all-LLM code is that all the time as a vibe. More or less.
December 30, 2025 at 7:06 PM
Now if only we could convince my managers of this!
December 30, 2025 at 7:08 PM
(…also jesus I really have been doing this for more than twenty years when did that creep up on me 😳)
December 30, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Kevin Riggle
This somewhat reminds me that I initially learned Matlab by being forced to read code that had been generated by python script.
Just the idea that would be the norm is completely nightmare inducing
December 30, 2025 at 7:00 PM
And at least there it was generated in a deterministic way and you can maybe even inspect the Python script!
December 30, 2025 at 7:03 PM
and I don’t have it because I’ve spent twenty years fixing other people’s code. So I think there’s some danger to not spreading that work around a little bit both from a social standpoint as well as a skills development one
December 30, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Early in my career I kind of resented being the junior dev who got given the CTO or super-dev’s prototype and told to make it good because prototyping always felt like the fun part. Now a couple months into a big project of my own I’m realizing that there really is a skill to prototyping well
December 30, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Kevin Riggle
In general imho we have a large tendency to believe that outcomes are driven more by consistent individual traits than they are, as opposed to difficult to imagine but very powerful environmental effects. So for org leaders, I encourage identifying structural levers first!
December 30, 2025 at 3:59 PM
-> When it becomes clear the second system will never launch he runs into the woods never to be seen or heard from again
December 30, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Honestly I suspect it to follow the usual circle of life from before vibe coding, which was vibe code up an overgrown prototype -> it becomes structural for the company -> the original author is like “we can build a better second system” -> vibe codes up a second even more overgrown prototype
December 30, 2025 at 6:53 PM
My worst case of this I had five direct managers and four skips in fifteen months
December 30, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Or any one person’s individual tenure in them
December 30, 2025 at 6:49 PM