Comment by Animats
14 days ago
The classic issue of who made the first tongs could be inserted here, with some hammering.
(It's a classic legend. There is an Islamic legend that Allah gave the first pair of tongs to the first blacksmith because you need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs. There's a Nordic legend that Thor made the first tongs. In reality, somebody probably used a bent piece of green wood, which didn't last long, but could be easily replaced.)
His piece "Vibe Coding, Final Word"[1] is relevant right now.
[1] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/vibe-coding-final-word....
Whitworth [0] showed that you can make a more precise tool than the one you use to make it. This means you "evolve" towards tongs, or screws, or high-precision calipers, or anything else you want to make, if you use the right process.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Whitworth
Simon Winchester did a book on this:
_The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World_
(alternately title _Exactly_)
https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/56364115-the-perfect...
and for further technical details see:
_Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy_ by Wayne R. Moore
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262130806/foundations-of-mechan...
Please don't recommend "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" without also providing a source. The prices people want for it are absurd if it is even available.
2 replies →
According to "official" legend it was the brothers Brokkr & Eitri who made Mjolnir, though I couldn't find anything about the tongs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokkr
Re: "funcall's vibe coding findings", it makes sense that human-style lisp (/tongs) would be too nonlinear for LLMs (or gods like Thor) to generate?
Edit: but in line with latter-day retcons it also makes sense that Thor would get credit for something good that Loki did
It doesn’t make any sense that you’d need tongs to make tongs; just hold the workpiece. Maybe you cant draw out the reins quite so much on your first one. (Ok im a modern blacksmith that assumes the existence of rolled bar as a source material)
But a hammer! How do you make a hammer without a hammer?
Find a chunk of raw metal (possibly meteoric iron, more likely copper) of a suitable size/shape, find a tree, using a sharp rock, saw off a suitable branch, split it open, insert the metal chunk, using vines or the intestines of a small animal secure it in place --- if desired, allow the tree to grow around the inclusion for a couple of years, then use a sharp rock to saw off the branch at a suitable length.
That's not remotely "vibe coding" though. Vibe coding would be like using Claude Code or Codeium Windsurf with a recent model. Something that does the code edits for you and optionally lets you code-review them first to approve/deny. Not copy-pasting GPT4o-produced bupkis.
Have you considered the possibility that this would have made things worse?
If you don’t actually take the opportunity to review the code, I’ve found that it almost certainly does.
Don’t “vibe code” while you’re sleepy, for example