On RAD and Text

Source: Atsuya Uki, cover of "Titan", a sci-fi novel on artificial intelligence

one fairly intelligent insight that I think I can share, having thought through it some, is that “gen ai” coding with chatbots, or art, or writing, is all an evolution of what used to be known as “Rapid Application Development” and it’s a category that afaict was set up in the 90s to describe tools that allowed folks to stand up apps “quickly” with clear limits to their actual maintainability. Visual Basic was marketed as such, Visual Basic for Applications (hideous thing) too. HyperCard and its scripty things that were imitated in Macromedia Director. To some degree this was also Flash.

and there’s a whole body of research with “agents” — they reuse this word for genai, in fact — from the same time period that’s entirely built around having no-coders do coding.

the idea that any one of these could replace programmers was kinda a big through line but of course I think something that folks haven’t quite glommed onto is that programming is as much about structure and creative expression and working with other people as the arts, really.

sorry, you make a fuss about breaking programming, you also break the arts. writing and visual works. it’s all very much language and expression. the big difference in a sense is that you can maybe futz about with structure in art and writing more than programming will allow. but the structures are there, they just don’t scream at you as loudly.

so could someone use a chatbot to create Myst in the same way that HyperCard allowed Cyan Worlds to create that game, plus several others aimed at kids with surreal art and light sound and music? oh yeah, but this generation of no-coders is a big time hustler group so the appeal to creatives is way way bogged down in the NFT bullshit and the sense now that they’re not just coming after those pimple faced programmers in the basement, they’re coming after you.

(but being fair, the pimple faced programmers were not really that special. it just happens that when you try to commodify telling a computer to do what you want, you commodify every other act of telling a computer to do what you want.)

this insight was brought about by a throwaway line in one of those widely circulated essays where the author, skeptical of coding by “vibes” with AI prompts, was wondering why Kent Beck who emphasized readable reusable code and rapid application development environments was so head over heels for gen ai programming. well, uh, in one sense, it’s the same picture.

corrolary; I have, very early on, when trying to find work in the years after the great recession, tried to work on many code bases built on RAD environments like Visual Basic for Applications in Excel and ASP.Net’s VBScript. it’s fucking awful. using a language that intentionally tries to self-correct for bad input leads to weird ass bugs, undefined behaviour, and a sense that however impressive that final product may be, so impressive that it’s worth selling a company to Oracle, it’s the most hellish thing that I have ever tried to build any thing on top of. jesus.

I don’t doubt these people are doing more coding than ever, but the biggest users are building up sandcastles that they throw away and rebuilt constantly. just a waste of effort.

and of course there is a middle ground where you know how to make the thing but you also want to depend on RAD tools (GenAI) to get you some of the way there. my experience is that it’s still a tradeoff, you may be able to get some outputs out faster but they won’t be high quality unless you are really trying to second guess the inputs to a minute detail. at which point, why not just write it from scratch.

the quality though, depending on the thing, may be just high enough.

Transcript of text messages sent by Interipelli, June 28, 2025