CodeValley is a new low in sucker VC bafflegab. Fucking Magic™, but on Blockchain™.
CodeValley is the latest from the world of Blockchain™.
The "idea" is that you have a problem, so you put up a contract to fully-automated Vendors to supply the libs for a program to solve your problem. At no point does a coder have to write actual code apparently, it's all done by the machines ... somehow. All of this is paid for in penny shavings.
"This isn’t open source, and it isn’t closed source. It’s no source." (well, that's bracingly honest of them.)
Even Hacker News doesn't buy this shit. "the whitepaper reads something like what I'd imagine somebody trying to troll the software industry would write"
Here's the "whitepaper". It reads like a example of the CodeValley concept applied to marketing, or perhaps Hacker News fed to a Markov chain. (And be sure to "View Source" on that page.)
To be fair, it's reviving an old hype: "this will end programming! All you need to do is fill in a form and define the problem." This was first said about COBOL. I think the last time anyone said it quite that bluntly was The Last One in 1981.
Putting it on Blockchain™ is of course the obvious next step, and suggests a network of autonomous software vendor programs seeking out old sucker scams to put on Blockchain™.
So, what is CodeValley? It is literally code from thin air. Here is the lead CodeValleyer explaining it. Now it sounds saneish up to a point - you work out what lib-like things you need, those are contracted out to a Vendor. That's the bit where you'd expect a human would be doing the job. But no:
I just wanted to stress one last time that that trickling down goes all the way to the hardware. There is no more writing of code, as we have outsourced (and outsourced and outsourced) the design of the program until it is so detailed that only bytes need to be placed (or binary CPU instructions). Pretty cool huh?
So cool it's literally fucking magic.
Looking at how it's supposed to work, the lead proponent says:
A developer's IP - the decisions they automate their Vendor to make and the supplier that Vendor is automated to contracted - stays protected inside their Vendor program. We are not privy to how you designed your Vendor any more than any other user in the network is.
You fill in a form, and define the problem. (This is assumed to constitute a creative work you have a defensible copyright in.) Then you send this to a multilayered compiler chain that puts it together at byte level. You might think that THIS IS LITERALLY WHAT PROGRAMMERS DO, and that "do what I mean" is the entire hard bit of programming no matter how many layers it's on top of, but obviously you need enlightening as to the magic of Blockchain™.
There's a whole advertising subreddit: /r/codevalley
I'm wondering who the target market is. Sucker VCs? Developers themselves?
This sort of sci-fi (not SF, but bug-eyed monsters and special effects) approach was the sort of thing people were talking about before open source became popular, a fractal micropayments nightmare world where everything contracted to everything else for penny shavings. "Imagine if we had micropayments in open source for every lib that every lib you use uses, how much better it would all work." Except now they've automated it on Blockchain™. Left-pad on Blockchain™.
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