The Exercise

This week we're running a collaborative exercise to try vibe coding for yourself and reflect on the experience. Rather than an abstract prompt, we're working with a specific historical object which is Christopher Strachey's Love Letter Generator from 1952.

Christopher Strachey (1916-1975) stands as one of the key figures whose work we now recognise as a foundational transitions in computational culture. The Stracheys belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, the group of intellectuals including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Strachey's uncle Lytton Strachey, which makes his later computational work all the more interesting for crossing of cultural and technical domains.

He was a pioneer in programming language design and denotational semantics, Strachey programmed the first computer music in England in 1951, rendering the National Anthem on Manchester's Ferranti Mark 1, followed by recordings of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and "In the Mood" captured by the BBC. More significant still, in 1952 he created a love letter generator for the same machine that represents the first known instance of computer-generated literature, a development that prefigures contemporary anxieties about LLMs whilst also gesturing towards the literary experimentalism of his milieu.

His later development of time-sharing concepts in 1959 points to the infrastructural transformations that enable the distributed computational environments we now inhabit. What makes Strachey's life so fascinating is how it demonstrates the convergence of cultural, technical and literary spheres, collapsing distinctions that are difficult to cross over, even today.

The (literary) significance of the Love Letter Generator extends beyond its curiosity as an early version of computational culture. It seems to be a parody of one of literature's most codified genres, the love letter. It contains conventional declarations, expected rhythms of longing and affirmation, etc.. Strachey's algorithm (which sadly we seem to have lost) might be what the Russian Formalists would call a device of amatory writing, revealing the "templates" that structure even our most intimate texts. The generator's outputs read either as both sincere and satirical, occupy the same uncomfortable space as Oulipian constraint-based writing or Burroughs's cut-ups, which would emerge a decade later. The fact that Strachey drew his vocabulary from Roget's Thesaurus, shows fascinating connections to the idea of a systematisation of language. Perhaps this deepens the irony as the love letter, supposedly a singularity of expression, is revealed as a combinatorial operation on an inherited lexical dictionary. This might make us think of the generator not just as an engineering experiment but as a work of literary theory made executable, a machine for demonstrating that romantic discourse, like all discourse, is structured by rules that precede and exceed the speaking subject.

Your task: use an LLM to create your own version of the Love Letter Generator, then document what happens.

You can use our new CCS workbench or any other LLM to help co-create it

Why Strachey?

The Love Letter Generator is arguably the perfect historical antecedent for vibe coding. Written for the Manchester Mark 1, Strachey's algorithm generates "love letters" by filling sentence templates with words randomly selected from lists compiled from Roget's Thesaurus. The original code is lost, but the algorithm has been reimplemented many times.

A sample output:

DARLING SWEETHEART

YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY: MY TENDER LIKING.

YOURS BEAUTIFULLY

M. U. C.

This raises the follwing questions:

1. The letters are grammatically correct, emotionally legible, yet produced without actual understanding. Strachey noted his interest in how "a rather simple trick" could produce "an illusion that the computer is thinking", anticipating both the ELIZA effect and what I'm calling elsewhere the "competence effect," but for text generation rather than dialogue.

2. Who wrote these letters? Strachey? The machine? Roget (whose Thesaurus supplied the vocabulary)? This question of distributed authorship maps directly onto vibe coding's triadic hermeneutic structure.

3. Both Strachey and Turing were gay men working during the 1952 prosecutions. Jacob Gaboury reads the generator as "pure camp", as an exultant love of the artificial. The gender-neutral, anonymous letters can be read as a quiet act of resistance.

4. There was a Code Critique thread on the Strachey Love Letter Algorithm at the 2024 CCSWG, proposed by Titaÿna Kauffmann. Key questions included: How is reimplementation a reinterpretation? What does it tell us about the legacy and "reborn-digital" heritage of Strachey? How can we "queer" this narrative through CCS? This questions remain (even more) relevant to vibe coding.

The Sprint Structure

Days 1-2: Vibe code your generator

Choose an LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, the CCS workbench or whatever you have access to) and prompt it to create a Love Letter Generator. You might, for example,

• Ask it to recreate Strachey's original algorithm
• Ask for a "love letter generator" without mentioning Strachey
• Share Montfort's reimplementation and ask for modifications
• Try different approaches and see what emerges
• Remember to keep your prompt history. This becomes a primary text for critical reading.

Days 2-4: Document the cognitive modes

As you work, you might want to pay attention to, for example,

• Cognitive delegation: Where did you offload judgment to the LLM? Did it lead you down unproductive paths?
• Productive augmentation: Where did human architectural control combine effectively with machine implementation?
• Cognitive overhead: Did managing the LLM's context or correcting its assumptions take you significant effort?

Note any moments where the "competence effect" appeared, which is where the LLM's output looked ok but was subtly wrong, or where its apparent understanding masked a deeper misunderstanding.

Days 2-7: Share and compare

Post your reflections to this thread (and the code if it is short enough - consider using the "Spoilers" tag to make the post manageable by others.

1. Does your LLM's version resemble Strachey's structure, or does it "improve" it?
2. What did the LLM add or subtract?
3. Is the output a reimplementation of Strachey, of Montfort's reimplementation, or of the concept of a love letter generator?
4. How do we read the differences critically?
5. What does your prompt history reveal about the distribution of agency?

Resources

Strachey's Algorithm

• Nick Montfort's Python reimplementation: https://nickm.com/memslam/love_letters.py
• Interactive version: https://www.gingerbeardman.com/loveletter/
• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strachey_love_letter_algorithm
• David Link's Manchester Mark 1 emulator reconstruction: https://alpha60.de/art/love_letters/
• Previous CCSWG thread: https://wg.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/152/code-critique-strachey-love-letter-algorithm-thread
• The Critical Code Studies workbench, which allows you to create code within the tool, https://wg.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/205/critical-code-studies-workbench

The Core Love Letter Logic

The algorithm is remarkably simple. From Montfort's reimplementation:

def longer():
    return (
        ' My'
        + maybe(adjectives)
        + ' '
        + choice(nouns)
        + maybe(adverbs)
        + ' '
        + choice(verbs)
        + ' your'
        + maybe(adjectives)
        + ' '
        + choice(nouns)
        + '.'
    )
def shorter():
    return ' ' + choice(adjectives) + ' ' + choice(nouns) + '.'

It contains a template plus word lists. It can be understood quickly and reimplemented in any language, and which makes it ideal for observing what LLMs do when asked to recreate it.

Critical Reading

• JSTOR Daily: "The Love Letter Generator That Foretold ChatGPT": https://daily.jstor.org/the-love-letter-generator-that-foretold-chatgpt/
• Paul Curzon's description from the Wayback Machine.
• Gaboury, J. (2013) ‘On Uncomputable Numbers: The Origins of a Queer Computing’, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus [Preprint]. Available at: https://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/on-uncomputable-numbers-the-origins-of-a-queer-computing/

Vibe Coding Discussion

This exercise lets us examine several questions

• When an LLM "reimplements" Strachey's code, what is it actually doing? Is it reading Montfort's version? Training data that includes discussions of the algorithm? The concept filtered through countless blog posts?
• Does your LLM produce something that looks like Strachey's generator but operates differently? How would you know?
• From Strachey (1952) to ELIZA (1966) to vibe coding (2025) can we trace how the "competence effect" intensifies as systems become more capable while remaining equally lacking in understanding. Does your experience of vibe coding confirm or question this genealogy?
• What would it mean to do critical code studies on the vibe coding session itself, including the prompts, the iterations, the failures, rather than on the resulting code?
• If Strachey's generator produces grammatically correct, emotionally legible love letters through pure combinatorics, what does this suggest about the relationship between literary form and authentic expression? Does the generator parody the love letter, or does it reveal something already present in the genre?
• Given the Bloomsbury Group's preoccupation with sincerity, intimacy, and the limits of language, particularly in figures like Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, how might we read Christopher Strachey's generator as continuous with rather than discontinuous from that literary project?

I'll post my own attempt and reflections partway through the week. Looking forward to seeing what emerges and post your experiences below.