The consumer/producer dichotomy misses another aspect of coding, with or without AI.
About a decade ago, STEM education was trendy and everyone was getting Lego, Raspberry Pi etc to build robots and writing Python in the name of STEM. You can ask LLM what STEM standards for.
The Maker movement is not about consuming or producing for consumption. Some people might get incentive to be influencers and profit off it. But the majority of the kids who went through this process become adults and moved on to be producer/consumer and playing with AI now. I believe their curiosity and creativity.
I finished reading the thin book "Systemantics" by John Gall yesterday (thanks @dang).
I realized that the problem of AI generated/edited content flooding everywhere around us is a symptom of something wrong with the System.
It might have something to do with sensory deprivation. Here is a quote from the book caught my attention because of the word "hallucination":
> As we all know, sensory deprivation tends to produce hallucinations.
> FUNCTIONARY’S FAULT: A complex set of malfunctions induced in a Systems-person by the System itself, and primarily attributable to sensory deprivation.
(As I typed the text above on my iPhone, I was fighting auto completion because AI was trying to “correct” the voice of John Gall and mine to conform the patterns in its training data. Every new character is a fight against Gradient Descend.)
All you need is attention but the cost of attention is getting higher and higher when there is little worth our attention.
Thanks for the recommendation. I downloaded both social.pdf and noproof.pdf on my Kindle Scribe to read them carefully and revisited the discussions on EWD638 and EWD692.
It is very interesting to see how Sir Tony diverged from EDW: one is right in theoretical sense but cynical about human fallacies and how the society is heading towards more wasteful complexity, one is to live with it and stay optimistic.
There is a proverb in Chinese Taoism:
小隱隱於野，大隱隱於市
A small recluse hides in the wild, while a great recluse hides in the city
Hoare was more focused and diplomatic while Dijkstra was more of a free-ranging philosopher.
I still remember the first time i came across Hoare Logic/Triple and Dijkstra's GCL/Weakest precondition, understanding nothing and feeling like a complete dolt.
As a young'un i thought knowing the syntax of a language and learning some idioms/patterns was all you needed for programming. Reading Hoare/Dijkstra showed me where mathematical theory met programming practice.
Literate programming in the sense of Donald Knuth is more about the chain of thoughts of the programmer than documenting code with comments or doc strings.
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
Being 4.5 months behind the trend has its advantage. ;-)
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