AI lets crappy coders produce even more crappy code faster

The game of chess is like a sword fight
You must think first before you move
Toad style is immensely strong and immune to nearly any weapon
When it's properly used it's almost invincible

The soldier was screaming, finger locked on the trigger of his M16 A1 spewing 700 rounds a minute on full auto as he ran at his opponent.

Who dropped to one knee and fired once.

BEEP.

Screaming guy was “dead.” So he took off his helmet and sat on it. Maj. Gen. John Galvin leaned over to our guest:

What do you think?

I think that screaming guy wasn’t aiming.

Maj. Gen. Aubrey S. Newman (Retired) was our guest at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, for a MILES demonstration. The Multiple Integrated LASER Engagement System (Yes, MILES turned into LazerTag) was tuned – an M16 could “kill” a soldier, but not a tank; tanks could “kill” other tanks. Once you were shot, your vest went off and you had to “sit on your hat” - helmet, as it were – and wait to be evacuated to the rear as KIA. You’d be brought back the next day as a reinforcement. For yourself.

Newman was small f famous. Big F Famous folk are the ones everyone knows: Taylor Swift. Douglas MacArthur. Small f famous folk are known in their trade by the practitioners, the aficionados.

Gen. Galvin was the commander of the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) that day in Georgia. Newman was the legendary commander who’d led the 34th Infantry Regiment of the 24th Infantry Division ashore at Leyte’s Red Beach in the Philippines on October 20, 1944. Pinned down by withering Japanese fire he’d yelled Pick up your rifles and follow me, then led the charge that broke the defenders. To this day Newman’s words are sung by soldiers all over the world; the Army has incorporated them into a marching cadence:

Oh soldier, combat soldier
Pick up your rifle and follow me!
I am the infantry...

Newman was a warfighter, and he knew the warfighter’s rule:

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Everyone’s instinct under fire is to fire back as fast as possible. Indeed, later versions of the M16 would replace full auto with a three-shot burst when you pulled the trigger to stop everyone from indiscriminately and futilely emptying entire magazines into the ether.

Think. Aim. Then fire.

I interviewed Gen. Newman afterwards for The Patriot base newspaper. I’d been a soldier long enough to suspect Pick up your rifles and follow me was not a precise quote:

Did you really say Pick up your rifles and follow me?

$#!%!!!!$%&*#@!@#$% no, my PAO said that. He cleaned it up.

Gen. Newman was once again demonstrating the colorful nature of infantry discussion, and the propensity of Public Affairs Officers to translate Infantry Chatter into politer language.

Well what did you say?

I don’t know; something along the lines of !@#$!!! Get your @!$! rifles and get off this beach before they shoot our !@#$%!! ar$es off!! I don’t remember exactly; they were shooting at us.

ESR is puzzled.

This is a certain kind of talk around LLMs that I find increasingly puzzling. That is all of the people bitching that LLMs constantly generate crap code and hallucinate solutions, and are worthless for programming. This has almost never happened to me, and never during the last two model generations I have used (chat GPT 5.4 and 5.5).

This reminds me of that old joke about the guy who asks Michelangelo how to sculpt a horse, and the master replies Simple! Just get a big block of marble and chop off everything that’s not part of the horse!

Works every time…IF YOU’RE MICHELANGELO.

If you’re not Michelangelo…you end up with marble dust and chips everywhere and a blob that looks like a 3-legged Shrek in a certain light if you squint just right.

Eric S. Raymond is small f famous enough among nerds to go by ESR. He’s one of those guys responsible for essential bits deep in the Internet plumbing that get used every day without anyone knowing, like NTPsec, which maintains secure, accurate timekeeping across internet infrastructure.

It’s like Brembo for your car; you may not know who made those clampy-looking things in the back of your tires, but if those Brembo brakes get stolen off your vehicle you’ll learn right quick how important they were.

So ESR is a world-class coder and one of the leading lights of the Open Source Movement. And he’s puzzled by all the fussing about vibe coding failures.

It all seems very simple to me. Be clear in your thinking, tell the model what you want with precision, and good things happen.
What...what am I missing here?

Here’s what he’s missing: A few decades ago Microsoft did a study that showed star coders produced 10 times the usable code of an average programmer.

Do the ESRs of the nerd world type 10 times faster? No. The study found that star coders mentally ran through five to 10 approaches and discarded them as flawed before identifying the correct design and then starting to code.

The average coders had to code each of those dead-end approaches to learn they wouldn’t work.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Coding is like a sword fight. You must think before you move.

Here’s what ESR is missing: Average coders write just as much code; but 90 percent is unusable.

And now newbies are vibe coding…and 90 percent of it is still unusable.

Actually it’s probably up to 95 percent.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

This is true of every AI use case. Using the latest and greatest AI toolkit does not make you ESR. Or Christopher Nolan. Or Akira Kurosawa.

Lots of folk are mad about Nolan’s Odyssey; I’m not sure why, and I don’t care enough to find out. Anyway people are threatening to make their own Odyssey using AI. Here’s a sample that’s already out:

Heavy Pulp@heavypulp

Dialogue scene from Homer's Odyssey built on Grok Imagine. Thread on how this was built below.

6:06 PM · Jul 21, 2026 · 16.7M Views

2.06K Replies · 1.84K Reposts · 21.6K Likes

I couldn’t make it through all three minutes.

Aubrey Newman knew you had to aim your weapon to be effective. Aubrey Newman knew that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Better tools let you build faster. The quality depends on you.

A big block of marble and a chisel does not make you Michaelangelo.

And you, your copy of King Lear and an unlimited license to Grok Imagine will not create Ran.

You need Akira Kurosawa for that.

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On Pentax Forums:

By cjfeola in Columns on Jul 29, 2026

One of the primary criticisms leveled against Pentax’s decision to stick with DSLRs is that autofocus for this older design has reached a dead end.

Perhaps. But autofocus on my Pentax K-3 III Monochrome is pretty great with PLM lenses. And it’s three years old. And yet still the newest DSLR. But let’s stipulate for the sake of the argument that DSLR hardware is maxed out.

What about software?

The real advances in autofocus over the last few years have been through AI subject recognition: OM-System’s Bird AI Subject Recognition, Nikon’s Subject Detection…heck, Sony even has discrete subject detection for trains, planes and automobiles!

So what if Pentax is working on, say, an upgraded K-3 — and an upgraded K-3 Monochrome, of course! — with the current best in class available APS-C sensor, the usual suite of sweet but incremental upgrades from the K-3 III, plus…

A cutting-edge AI processor jammed with every type of subject recognition.

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Friday August 7 - Foto.Feola.Friday