> >I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

> -- Linus Torvalds

What about programmers

- for whom the code is a data structure?

- who formulate their data structures in a way (e.g. in a very powerful type system) such that all the data structures are code?

- who invent a completely novel way of thinking about computer programs such that in this paradigm both code and data structures are just trivial special cases of some mind-blowing concept ζ of which there exist other special cases that are useful to write powerful programs, but these special cases are completely alien from anything that could be called "code" or "data (structures)", i.e. these programmers don't think/worry about code or data structures, but about ζ?

From what I understand from the vibe coders, they tell a machine what the code should do, but not how it should do it. They leave the important decisions (the shape of data) to an LLM and thus run afoul of this, which is gonna bite them in the ass eventually.

I think this is sometimes a barrier to getting started for me. I know that I need to explore the data structure design in the context of the code that will interact with it and some of that code will be thrown out as the data structure becomes more clear, but still it can be hard to get off the ground when me gut instinct is that the data design isn't right.

This kind of exploration can be a really positive use case for AI I think, like show me a sketch of this design vs that design and let's compare them together.

That is excellent. I'm putting that in my notes.