January 10, 2026
Mugs, Bugs, and Hypercube Hype
Code Is Clay
AI’s making the mugs — devs brawl over who gets to craft the weird hypercubes
TLDR: An engineer compared coding to pottery, saying artificial intelligence will mass-produce “mug” code while humans craft weird ideas. Comments erupted: some mocked AI hype, others called out executive vibes, and many asked who gets paid—can you support a family on hypercubes when machines flood the market?
An engineer took a pottery class, made a shimmering blue hypercube instead of a mug, and declared: with AI, the “industrial revolution of code” is here — machines will crank out the boring stuff, humans will craft the weird art. The crowd? Explosive. Hype-callers like emilsedgh rolled their eyes: we went from preaching strict rules to chasing shiny AI, proving “a good chunk” of the field just follows trends. Others went for the jugular. BossyTeacher read “focus on hypercubes” as executive cosplay: less building, more ordering people around.
Then came the existentialists. Analog8374 argued clay doesn’t need a mind, code does — so this artsy analogy breaks. Avicebron demanded real-world stakes: can anyone “buy a house and raise a family” with hypercubes when factories (and LLMs) flood the market with cheap code? Meanwhile, snarks like CuriouslyC clapped back at the doomers: if complaining was currency, we’d all retire.
The humor was top-shelf: “Paint that hypercube Vantablack so it absorbs my deadlines,” “AI writes mugs, I’ll throw bugs,” and “Hypercube-driven development” memes everywhere. Whether you loved the metaphor or loathed it, the feed turned into a kiln — firing takes at 1,000 degrees while asking who gets paid to make art.
Key Points
- •The author took a ceramics class and created a ceramic hypercube, prompting reflections on craft and medium.
- •The article argues code and clay are both malleable, error-prone mediums where ideas persist despite broken implementations.
- •It advocates not being overly attached to code; deleting and rewriting is part of the process.
- •An analogy is drawn to the industrial revolution in pottery: mass production didn’t eliminate craft but changed its role.
- •The author claims AI, particularly LLMs, will automate commodity coding, leaving humans to focus on creative, bespoke software work.