technology

I tried to do some light automation for Google Tasks because I have ADHD, I just want it to make some tasks when someone asks me to do shit.

Google Workspaces says it can do that! Wow! It has a template ready to go to do that!

Whoops, it:

-creates broken links to emails because they didn't quality check the fucking thing

-can't make non-broken links to emails without creating a fucking Google Sheet to create the link just to pass back one piece of text as a variable

-creates tasks for you when somebody else needs to do something. Every time.

-rereads the whole thread after every reply, creating duplicate tasks every time

-cannot create a subtask. Just can't do it

Hot take: Do you get paid for working or is it your business? Honestly, just give in and code properly in your free or downtime (of which you will have a lot while the clanker is churning out token salad).

The only thing you have to watch out for is not taking on more load.

IMHO, this is just the latest fad of a long slide down starting in the 70s and it's not worth the energy to try to singlehandedly prevent it. Capitalism dictates it. Programming hasn't been a craft for a long time, it's assembly line work and you shouldn't destroy yourself over it.

I have zero interest in "AI", negative interest even. I am the digital Lorax. These people enjoy comfortable lives, yet I have 15 yoe as a SWE and have been unemployed for 3 years because I am a "controversial identity" (i.e. a woman) in a field that has a 10:1 gender ratio full of the shittiest men on the planet who are now emboldened to be even shittier to people like me. Very, very difficult to have hope in this era.

I mass deleted all of my vibed code recently, it's really good at making you feel like you're accomplishing something but as I learned once my big project got past a certain point of complexity it just became completely unable to add new features to it without breaking everything in ways I couldn't understand because I had offloaded all of my thinking during the dev process. I kept seeing the same bugs regress over and over again, which I realized was because the LLM was changing bits of the code that it wasn't supposed to be working on to what it thought was correct, repeating the same mistakes over and over.

These days I think the only decent use case for LLMs is as a suped up Google search, and even then the only reason they're good at that is because using Google manually has been enshittified by generative content.

Part of my job is overseeing and reviewing submissions to our open source repo.

I have started getting AI submissions and they are absolute dog shit and they make me so mad.

I complained to the people who run the intake pipeline for the submissions and they're like "what if you added documentation for the AI to read to the codebase so it wouldn't make these mistakes?"

It's just maddening to think about how little respect for what I do these vibe coders have that they won't spend any of their human attention on the submissions, but fully expect me to use mine to clean up after them.

I said this shit when automatic garbage collection and high level languages became the norm in business applications. Companies don't give a shit about quality if they can throw more money and processing power at the problem.

Instead of returning to writing actual code, companies will build trillion dollar workflows around making Claude code kinda workable long term.

I'm a vibe scientist. If I want to do a study, I will have ChatGPT summarise every article about the topic ever written. Then I give it a blank spreadsheet with the prompt "fill in data that confirms a discovery, then summarise the discovery in a study and summarise the study for me". During this I pause for a break and push a button that injects cat food into a feeding port in my abdomen, something ChatGPT said would make me more efficient in our world-changing scientific pursuit. I have published 200k studies today.

I give 0 leeway to AI assisted coders. I get that it's used all the time in business now and there are legitimate uses for it, but I don't care to spend the time to try and differentiate. I regularly use /r/SelfHosted because I have my own server running two dozen different things, but if a project even hints at AI usage, it's not touching my server.

There was recently an app, Huntarr, that showed the consequences of this garbage. I'd rather 0 solutions to a problem exist than 5 vibe coded ones these hacks think they are "helping" the community with.

There's even a rule on that subreddit now that those projects can only be posted on Fridays (though recently dialed down/changed). It's not enough. There needs to be anti-AI witch hunts in those spaces or else it's akin to the Nazi Bar problem. If you allow it even a little bit, they will take and take and argue endlessly that it's fine because they're a professional programmer of 12 years, they just don't know C#, blah, blah, I literally don't care.

I've even used AI myself to "code" stuff like scripts that do something I will need to do once ever on my desktop. But keep that stuff on your own computer.

I tried using copilot for production code for the first time, I had an excel spreadsheet with a few inputs and a few dozen of cells with formulas based on those inputs that I needed as a python script

The first version used some external library to read the spreadsheet and then just query the values from the cells with formulas

I spesified that I needed those calculations as code, copilot told me that it just needed the coordinates of the cells (those were in the first prompt), I gave it the coordinates again and it said that it was missing the spreadsheet (also in the first prompt)

I'm not worried about my job (at least not because of AI, testing is the second on the chopping block right after security)

I haven't written much code lately but when I was doing my web dev thing and app dvelopement, I learned real quick that if you are someone like me that isn't all that confident and you do use AI, it's a tool. It's stupid as fuck but you use it as a tool. Use it to help scalffold or when you are hella stuck on an issue.

I used AI when I wrote code because I usually didn't have another dev to bounce ideas off of. It was basically my fancy rubber duckie.

With that said, my last app is like 75% vibe coded, I wrote it a year ago but I can go back right now and tell you what any part of the code is doing.

It's really fucking sad that as this industry is getting cannibalized some of us with college degrees and years of experience can't find a job but these slop generating vibe coders get hired.

Also who ever the fuck trained ChatGPT to use emojis in code comments can face the fucking wall.

I'm hoping and predicting vibe coders are going to bring down a couple of major (and minor) corporations in the next few years, so I say let them cook.

Free software projects will be less impacted I think, the people in charge aren't under the same kind of pressure to take shortcuts usually. The longevity of many projects already proves that maintainability is a high priority for them.

Hard to believe that corporate America is now even more poisoned than before the AI apocalypse

yeah i get the feeling that it's only a matter of time until vibe coding is the only job left, and all code is shit built on shit. It seems like fewer and fewer projects care about quality, performance or reliability, as long as it gets done on time.

the whole industry is built upon pump and dump get rich quick schemes, idk how youd even find an employer that takes their product seriously.

It's so annoying to review vibe coded changes. Those LLMs are really good at making superficially good looking code. Than you bother to actually dig into it, find something questionable, ask for details and find out they don't know. Now you can either be the reason the dead line fly by or you accept code that not a single person understands.

It's so difficult to give a shit about anything when that's just the working environment. It's so appealing to just put in the prompt and not even bother to even read the output since you are already checked out mentally. And in the end of the day, I'm getting asked like once a week by my boss to use the agent more.

I wonder if this is the proletarianization of software development. (I know it's a work relationship but in some ways it didn't feel like just "any other job" before)

I've found Claude to be pretty competent at conforming to the existing architectural patterns that I have implemented

It's pretty good at taking a rest contract and spitting out a perfectly reasonable data later implementation

It's just kind of how the industry is headed now, which kind of sucks. I like writing code, so I'm using the tools to try to automate the boring stuff

I tried to get help from ChatGPT to fix a crash on an open source app I use (I'm by no means a proficient coder but I know the basics).

After like an hour I think it's leading me in circles and it definitely hallucinated a key part of its diagnosis.

oh one thing, whilst the media perception of vibe coders is someone who explicitly chooses not to pay attention to the fact they are completely alienated from every technology that they are interacting with, most vibe coders are simply the dipshits who have brought themselves into a state of learned helplessness And still think they're putting out high quality work. that's the scary shit. enjoy

IDK this industry is going down the tubes. I know it feels damn good when a piece of code I'm working on finally "clicks" but I'm afraid no one values that anymore. The machines are just good enough to let your less experienced/lazy coworkers wing it and let the machine get it 90% right. That 10% will cause a very funny meltdown someday but who cares? All that matters is line go up!

But seriously, this generative AI slop is putting us out of work. Might as well use it and take the easy route because your job isn't going to value actual quality anymore. Watch "Office Space"

I don't even work in a "coding" job but a few of us have to occasionally do some minor things (like automatically generating mean-time-to-failure from maintenance reports etc). The one person who uses slop generators somehow has lower output than the other two of us. My boss is annoyed by him but apparently the higher ups LOVE that he's using AI because I guess it justifies them having bought clippy pro edition or whatever.