Vine coding is where you write code using whatever tools you want, but only for six seconds.

...after which the universe spontaneously ceases to exist and reinvents itself more bizarre and inexplicable?

meh, already happened.

Several times.

When you code, use AI like you use a spelling checker, especially autocorrect.

Whomever blindly trusts the autocorrect while texting or emailing will have a short but "interesting" social life.

Anyone who trusts AI generated code will have a short but "interesting" career in programming.

"short but interesting social life."

Given the number of words that rhyme with luck I can easily see how autoconfuse might sabotage your social life.

Texting " After work I am going to muck about with a few girls from the typing pool " while excusing the anachronism and meaning a few drinks and gossip with Mrs Slocombe et al., autoconfuse and muck isn't likely to always end well.

There are [1]endless many examples

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/funny-2021-autocorrects

... like you use a spelling checker, especially autocorrect.

In another life, I occasionally used spelling checkers, albeit to (very) limited success.

It was not long after that I realised that the device could only be as good as the dictionary it was using.

And then only if I thoroughly read everything over before finally accepting the corrections.

As most if not all of the time said dictionaries were utter crap, inexorably leading me to search for the correct data in a good unabridged dictionary, I gave up.

Aa a result I polished the knowledge of the English language that Mrs. Fowler tried to drill into my head, gods of literacy bless her.

Automatic correction?

Never dreamed of using it.

.

In my experience ( your mileage may vary) vine coding is when one partakes of the fruit of the vine prior to coding.

Personally as as young programmer, and a good part of a bottle of jack daniel’s ( technically not of the vine, but related) I did have great results.

Not part of my general m.o. but…. could this be what the letter writer was referring to? Defo sounds like it was vine writing at least…

You mean the [1]Balmer Peak . It is very hard to get the levels just right.

[1] https://xkcd.com/323/

I find it takes the edge off those Teams meetings which take up 50% of the day so I can ignore the blabbing in the background and get some actual work done.

IYKYK...

Even worse, [1]Sarah .

Sarah Vine coding requires every thing is qualified with a "self.", all foreign functions are banned and reflection is simply not part of the language.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/13/digested-week-rachel-reeves-u-turn-sarah-vine-book

Systemd is a prime example of vine coding. It wraps its tendrils round everything.

Doc, you must spend way too much time on here but damn it all if you don't have some of the best replies on this darn forum.

Systemd is a prime example of vine coding. It wraps its tendrils round everything.

Redhat, which was also the leading culprit in the systemd felony, until RHEL5 had a device discovery service called kudzu which apart from causing some peculiar problems, † I assumed was a neologism from some dude programmer.

I discovered it is actually an extremely invasive vine particularly in the US (imported originally from Japan) that rapid gets its tendrils into everything.

There is some similarity between those two services and the way AI is infiltrating just about everything. Can't wait for AI enhanced systemd... actually I very much can...

† on servers kudzu was usually best disabled. That option is unavailable for systemd, alas.

... RHEL5 had a device discovery service called kudzu ...

Interesting ...

These days we have [1]zeitgeist .

It seems to be as kudzu as it can possibly be.

----------------------------

The Zeitgeist Project

Desktop Activity Logging

Providing Desktop Activity Awareness

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations.

It makes this information readily available for other applications to use.

It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

Features

Zeitgeist logs files opened, websites visited, conversations, and emails and provides all this information over a D-Bus API

Track events by time to figure out exactly when and how often a user accesses something.

Extensions (or as we call them Smack-ins) to provide more information on desktop usage, such as geolocation, focus timer, relevancy, and much more.

----------------------------

Smack-ins indeed .... 8^ /

.

[1] https://zeitgeist.freedesktop.org/

Brought to mind the (I thought pseudo) Latin aphorism " in vino veritas " but apparently from the elder Pliny.

Perhaps vibe (< vibrancy < fervor) we might have the effrontery to recast the Pliny as " in fervore falsitas ."

vino appears to be the ablative after "in" hence fervore rather than its accusative. Please pardon my ignorance if I err.

There's a Spanish chain of organic food shops called Veritas. They also sell wine. In Veritas, vino.

-A.

There used to be Robert Kilroy-Silk's e̶g̶o̶ t̶r̶i̶p̶ political party called Veritas (aka Vanitas). I always wondered if it might have been induced by too much vino.

If it was, I'll give you [1]one guess what type...

(aside: a couple of years ago my wife ordered a wine in the local cricket club and was asked "white or brown" by the bar-lady. Wisely, she chose white)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_wine

Short of a litany of expletives, AI in its current form is a horrid fetid mess:

* its bad for business that already provide crap customer support, often farmed out overseas, now they use chat agents to frustrate consumers to just hang-up.

* its bad for tech. businesses, more likely to create more work for developers to verify the correctness of code, instead of letting developers do what they do best - create.

* is bad for the environment, given AI monstrosities demand for power will negatively impact climate change further; power that would better serve the public for AC or heating as weather becomes extremely variable.

* is bad for education by creating a generation of youth incapable of critical thinking for themselves or understand how to do anything for themselves; a massive power cut and its not just mobile phones they loose, but their ability to think and deal with emergencies.

Very Intelligent [1]Brainfuck Emitter - It will be fun trying to figure out where the bugs are in the generated code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Probably marginally easier to debug than code in [1]Whitespace .

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Whitespace

Surely something to do with Banyan?

-A.

These kids these days and not even knowing Vines is Banyan! Yeah, I came here to say pretty much the same thing. And yell at clouds, of either sort.

When you're so shit at being a script kiddy that you can't even cut and paste something together!

Either from the editor's in-tray or from the forum itself.

Thanks for Adam Buxton, I hadn't previously encountered him but undoubtedly a national treasure. I had imagined the missive was from the goose quill of a Reform footsoldier if not Faredge himself.

Also the link to the previous Flame column (2018) which was brilliant.

How the regonomized Norman managed to work Wittgenstein into a comment on the coverage of some tedious typically British administrative bun fight completely eludes me but the University of Woolloomooloo's philosophy department must have been chuffed by the " sloshed as Schlegel " reference.

Thanks for Adam Buxton

I got him confused with [1]Adam Henson . But I guess he practises a different type of AI altogether.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Henson

Their trajectory is likely to be one of improvement as time goes by.

I find fault with this. People are always saying that AI will chart a never-ending path of improvement but if anything recent movement in LLMs has been more of a tug-o-war, improving some things and degrading others as new models and new sampling methods push and pull weights to fix specific problems without being able to understand how it will affect the whole.