I don’t think all Boomers are bad. Lots care about the climate, and (sadly) many younger people don’t care about the climate, too. Hence why I clarified:

a Boomer who doesn’t give a shit about the looming climate apocalypse.

The reason it matters they’re a Boomer is because anyone younger is going to be facing the reality of climate change regardless of what they care about.

I think you missed the bit that makes this sort of maybe make a tiny lick of sense: you use this to write code that you evaluate against tests, and put a maximum iterations counter in to make sure it doesn’t go infinite.

Yes, this is still going to melt the planet just a little bit faster every time it’s used. Yes, it’s most likely to completely fail and, even in cases where it eventually succeeds, it would likely have been orders of magnitude more compute efficient to vibe code it the usual way of actually, like, vibing the code. (Is that what re-prompting is called for vibe coding?)

But it could maybe, kinda, sometimes work. If you squint your eyes. And you’re a Boomer who doesn’t give a shit about the looming climate apocalypse.

Fuck Teams. The buggiest, most crash prone mess I’ve even been forced to use. They keep bolting on new, unnecessary “features” that only selectively work on some of their “supported” platforms.

I mean, it sort of is, but only for the specific question of asking for agreement with the preceding statement.

“This weather, eh?”
“The Leafs actually have a chance this year, eh?”

But not like “What’s your favourite colour, eh?” (Unless, maybe, it’s in the context where it’s obvious, like someone decked out head-to-toe in pink.)

I’ve copied and pasted other people’s Bookmarklets before. ;)

I’ve had a couple decades of eclectic, self-directed tech learning. There’s no money for technology in education, so I’m always kludging things together, and there’s nobody at any school I’ve ever worked at who can teach me much, so I need to figure shit out myself.

It’d have been nice to be a junior to a greybeard for a few years, but I’ve made it work.

Just FYI, ReviOS is a playbook (set of system changes) that strips all the crap out of Windows 11 while still being almost entirely functional (I believe it disables automatic driver downloads, but it still gets Windows security updates.) I use it in my VM.

It’s super easy—install Windows 11, run the ReviOS playbook, then a Ninite to install all the essentials (including Classic Shell I think? Although I prefer one called something like Start Back.)

I know enough to parse the code, especially with the comments. It was a logical algorithm, it worked, and it was just for reformatting a page to print cleanly, so there was basically no risk if it didn’t work. I code for work, I just don’t know JavaScript syntax or functions.

Anyway, I was impressed it actually worked. I’m an AI skeptic, which is why I thought it was noteworthy to get well documented, clean, functional code from vibe coding—even in such a trivial context as swapping a head tag and removing script tags.

I actually got really clean, well commented code from Copilot earlier this week.

I have no experience with JavaScript to speak of, but realized a Bookmarklet would be a perfect solution for reformatting a particular web app for printing. I already had a head replacement with CSS to do all the formatting, and I was using a RegEx to strip all script tags.

Anyway, I asked Copilot to write the Bookmarklet to replace the header, with full contents explaining the training behind the code, and an explanation of how the script functions below. When I got an error, I asked if to fix the error and or identified that Bookmarklets work better as single lines, so it fixed it. Then I added the requirement about replacing scripts, and it did that too, but for commented and a clean one-line version.

The one-live versions even up getting truncated, so I need to copy/paste from earlier (correct) endings, but otherwise it was an incredibly smooth experience.

I spent longer writing the guide for how to use it than the time it took to vibe code it and test it. I was super impressed.

(Granted, that’s a pretty easy coding task…)