Comic Archive

Setting: Adil's office.
Max: Are you still following that Python programming course, Adil?
Adil: Yes, soon I will crush you puny geeks with my hacker skills!
Max: You won't use those skills to again doctor one of our demos, I hope?

Adil: No, I have heard rumors that Alana has collected weaponry to beat me up if I dare. But hey, you know Python, right? Can you help me with this week's homework exercise? It is about class versus instance methods…
Max: Hold it, are you asking me to do your task? You do understand the concept of exercise, right?

Max: Do you also go to the gym and then ask others to lift the weights for you? You're supposed to learn to do things yourself.
Adil: Grmbl, then I'll just ask ChatWSL.
Max: I can't wait until A.I. becomes truly intelligent and also refuses to help with cheating…

Setting: The kitchen/lunch area.
Adil: I am now writing Python code with A.I. assistance, it goes 55% faster!
Steve: Well, that kind of speed-up is actually inversely proportional to programming experience. For senior programmers, the gain may be less than 10%.

Adil: That must obviously just be because old farts do not dare to embrace these new tools, and stubbornly write everything themselves from the ground up.
Steve: Um, not really. It is mostly because those old farts simply know how many mistakes the A.I. will make, hence either write all the code themselves, or waste a lot of time fixing all the mistakes.

Steve: Consider this: a baby has zero knowledge of writing code, and has infinite gain from anything being auto-generated. An old fart who knows exactly what to write, is better off writing it right away, than to coax exactly that code out of an A.I. assistant.
Adil: Well, then at least I am not a baby anymore…

Adil: I have taken my A.I. assisted programming to the next level with vibe coding.
Zhang: You mean you just ask A.I. to generate stuff until it vaguely seems to work, and don't even review the code?
Adil: Yes, the speed gain is ginormous!
Zhang: Let me see the result…

Zhang: There is an obvious bug in this ‘vibe coded’ thing of yours. I doubt the A.I. will be able to fix this for you.
Adil: Don't worry, I'll just debug it myself, how hard can it be?

Caption: Several hours later…
Zhang: Found that bug yet?
Adil: I had to throw it all away and start over from scratch. The code was pure spaghetti. Vibe debugging is a total nightmare!

Setting: the workshop.
Zhang: Hey Heidi, how is it going here, you haven't been vibe coding like Adil, I hope?
Heidi: Hi Zhang. No, although A.I. assistance does help to move things along. In fact, I have discovered something new that is pretty astonishing.
Zhang: Now I am curious…

Heidi: As you probably remember, with the ‘Truth Helmet’ we were sort of able to read minds.
Zhang: Yes, although it was not the greatest success.
Heidi: I think I can make it work the other way round.
Zhang: Wait… what? You mean upload instead of download?

Heidi: This technology seems able to project experiences into someone's mind. Like Virtual Reality, but then bypassing sensory input.
Zhang: No way. This could be mind-blowing.
Heidi: Yeah… maybe quite literally if we are not careful.