Verbosorama

I’m not innocent. Chances are if you’re reading this, neither are you. We’ve asked the robots to do our bidding. We’ve asked them to do things for us that we should be able to or should be able to have time to do ourselves. Once in those halcyon days where writing was a thing that counted and was taught, one had to in school essays and job applications fluff up ideas and turn what could be a single bullet point into a whole pile of words so that one looked smarter. I’ve done this and so have you.

I had the idea written down forever, and then I went and tried to build it thinking that it needed to just be built somehow. It was to be some sort of AI-addled/aided game of Telephone. In this version, you, the user, would type in a sentence, then choose from the handy dropdown how you fluff it up, and then AI would transform it into an entire paragraph. Then you would use the AI to transform it back to a sentence. Then there would be some sort of inherent commentary on the transformative power of words, how the modes of our writing has evolved to obtuse and dull tools crushing our collective spirits. Then something about something. Or an “amusing way to demonstrate how meaning can transform through processes of expansion and compression.” Claude wrote that bit.

So obviously I tried vibe coding it about two years too late. And of course I didn’t find this which does it in a way more interesting manner until after I failed with 23 times with v0. It was going to be some clever opposite of Bullshit Remover and ask what we are to expect from the future of our life with words. If language is to just be reduced to parlour games with robots in between us? In any case, here’s a dumb and and didn’t end up being fun exploration of that.

What can this thing do that is better than someone just prompting themselves and then prompting back? The answer is nothing really.

This vibe coding was nowhere near being punk as you would have hoped. I was hoping for Refused or Against Me, razor sharp commentary with unstoppable hooks, I got a bunch of old guys playing Damned covers at the community centre.

What did I learn? That you just have to build really not that great ideas to learn not to do that. If that makes any sense. That and using AI to build something with AI is fairly meta and Google gives you a lot of credits for free.