Coding with Clankers

I enjoy coding with clankers. In some parts of the internet, it feels like that has to be a confession, and in others you’ll be called a luddite if you’re not tokenmaxxing and attempting to become an AI vampire as fast as possible. Needless to say, it is an interesting time to be a programmer.

I started my career as a developer around the same time that the clankers were born, in early 2023. At this time, the concept of an “agent” was only just beginning to catch on. For my first two years of being a developer, I barely used AI at all, which really helped me learn the fundamentals. And even though I primarily learned to code through a web-focused bootcamp, I also started watching content from Casey Muratori, Ryan Fleury, Mike Acton, and other “hardcore” programmers. Learning from this group opened my eyes to what quality software is and how rare it is today. Learning how to build high-quality software will be a lifelong journey, but I think the knowledge I have gained from this group has given me a good bar to hold the clankers to.

I am not going to claim that clankers have made me a 100x developer, whatever that even means. I’m not shipping 37k LOC per day. And this website is not powered by 70k+ lines of clanker-generated Ruby. However, working with the clankers has opened up a lot of possibilities for me to create software for myself that I never would have before. Like the markdown editor that I am writing this post in. It is a true native app, written in Odin using SDL3 and NanoVG with a custom, prose-focused vim mode. No Electron, no Tauri, no web tech in sight. Just an immediate mode UI, a gap buffer, and a dream. The code is currently a bit of a mess and in need of a refactor, and the app is certainly not ready for primetime, but it’s slowly getting there. I already enjoy using it more than Obsidian. It’s an app I’ve wanted to make for a long time, but I never would have put the time into creating it if it wasn’t for the clankers because other side projects were higher on my list.

This won’t be news to most, but one of the big problems of coding with clankers is that they constantly make bad decisions. They can write very good code in isolation, but as soon as they are writing code that has to fit into an existing system, their lack of understanding quickly becomes clear. They are, by their nature, opposed to high-quality software, which is not surprising if you think about it. Since they are just word-guessing machines that have been trained on all the code (and books and other copyrighted material) Sam and Dario could find to stuff them with, they will always default to the average. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed the constant enshitification of everything, but the average quality bar for software is not very high these days.

I think the software industry is in dire need of a quality revolution. But if clankers write low-quality code by default, is it possible to create high-quality software working with them? I think so, but to be honest, I still can’t say yes for sure. That is something I am trying to figure out. It is also an open question still on whether it is actually a faster way to develop software. Take my markdown editor for example, I’ve been able to get to a working version of the app in a couple weeks of working on it in my spare time. That is a lot faster than it would be if I was writing all the code by hand, but I am worried I am going to hit a point where it becomes impossible to maintain and add features. Even though I am working slowly and intentionally to make sure I understand what the clankers are doing, boiling the frog is always a worry when clankers are writing your code.

I am not going to try and tell you how to make good software with the help of clankers because I am still trying to figure that out. I see a lot of developers online who care about the quality of their code and software, feeling pretty nihilistic towards the industry right now, and I can see why. However, I hope the outlook of the industry becomes more optimistic over time because writing high-quality software is hard, whether it’s by hand or with clankers. And I am very doubtful that a clanker will ever be able to create high-quality software without an experienced human making the decisions and fighting to keep the quality bar high. We need more developers who care and take pride in the quality of their work, especially now in a world with clankers writing code.

p.s. I feel that I should say, while I use clankers for most of my coding these days, I do not use them for my writing. Writing is thinking, and I am not ready to hand that job over to the clankers.