I learned to program from block programming, starting out when I was 12. I'm now a full-time developer and funded startup founder. You absolutely can learn complex concepts from simple primitives, and there is a large underground community pushing the limits of languages like Scratch. See for example Linux running on RISC-V running on Scratch:
In my experience, there’s no better way to learn more complex programming techniques or tools than running into a brick wall with the simple tools you’re familiar with, spending a ton of time on an unreasonably irritating solution, only to realize that you’re running into a classic [n] problem and some clever person figured out a simple logical trick to address it. I mean, it can be enraging but that knowledge tends to stick.
Couldn't agree more. To add on I think you can learn so much by doing something incredibly stupid you're really not supposed to in an intentionally constrained environment (in a good way, like the grandparent comment). The sort of absurd things that get posted here occasionally and get a few commenters genuinely annoyed that they're doing that with their time instead of curing cancer. Plus it tends to be easier than it looks.
(I think some people have caught on to this and found out that Claude is pretty good at it.. not sure what the point of that is but whatever)
There are many other languages we could consider low-level based on the premise of them allowing low access (e.g. "raw" assembly). We don't, because it would be nonsensical to judge the height of a language based on its abilities to forgo the abstractions it was built to provide.
I love how little latency there is on your website. I'm often thrown off by websites freezing on navigation, something we euphemistically call "loading". I feel we should have moved beyond that in the year of 2026. Your website really respects the user in this regard. Aesthetics are splendid as well.
Even then, I don't care about the "average writer". I want great output. I like to imagine that developers have some self-respect, but by now everyone in the industry is spending hundreds of hours every month reading some of the most poorly written prose we could imagine, simply because it affords us to think less.
>Is there a silent majority of Claude users who really enjoy what we call the LLM-isms? Maybe, but isn't Claude also largely aimed at developers?
Purely out of my own curiosity, I just asked Claude to have fun with itself by making itself a game it enjoys, to play it, and to write its experience.[1] I don't know if it's true or confabulated (maybe it doesn't really know its experience and is just hallucinating it) but I didn't mind reading it, the prose is fine for me. I don't mind reading Claude's writing. I mean let's be honest, we all read Claude's writing all day, most of the submissions on the front page on any given day are written by Claude.
Just before I made that game, I had Fable write up a scholarly report on any subject[2], it chose introspection by LLM's. (This is what made me think of asking it to play a game.) I didn't mind reading it, even though I don't think it really added anything very interesting. I don't think what it wrote is worth publishing, but I read it with interest.
I found I could read it easily and get up to date on the state of this question that it picked to answer.
So the bottom line is I don't mind reading Claude's output that much. Of course, I'm annoyed every time it says "honest", "genuine", "load-bearing", whenever it pushes back gently against something, etc. But it's not the end of the world.
I would think that it would be the opposite. Nobody is seriously detoxing or comfortmaxxing AIs yet. Human brains are fed back its own output in learning mode, so we are great at removing whatever we feel uncomfortable from our output, online and offline. No such paths exist for AIs.
https://turbowarp.org/1201938491
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