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This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Pulled up my phone and seriously thought this was a picture of me from like 15 years ago. Then I realized how common the look is among this industry.
Reminds me of a time a couple years ago when I took a brewery tour around Boston. Every. Single. Guy. Including myself and the driver/tourguide...looked exactly like this guy, with a beer gut and a plaid shirt.
Yeah but next time I have this exact same super specific issue I'm going to fuckin fly man.
In some cases, it is "code as documentation". Saves me from 1) remembering the steps 2) means I actually doing the steps correctly 3) Actually remembering to do the 10 minute task when I need to.
If I had not done the program, then I often would have to write down and maintain documentation elsewhere.
I love this chart, have used it more than once 😄
But something it doesn't factor in is when you want to automate something to remove the human error on a repeated task. Having to correct a report you already sent to the customer is not fun
Of course there's an XKCD for everything, thank you
The modern one:
When there's a function that can be written manually in 10 minutes but you find a way to do it in 10 days using LLMs
And the steps aren’t reproducible because the LLM does something different every time. So you can’t consistently recreate it.
If it's a task that has to be done every day for 4 years, you're actually saving time. And that's if we assume only one person has to do it, if it's 10 people, you're saving time after 5-6 months. 10 minutes adds up quickly once it starts scaling.
Assuming you set it up perfectly the first time, instead of it breaking for some reason six weeks later and then you spend three hours figuring out/remembering how you set it up in the first place and another two nights after work fixing it so it works as intended.
Also your use case has changed, so it needs to be retooled to address the new situation.
Other than that... worth it.
5 years is also a pretty arbitrary span to go with. You could smoothly discount future time savings instead, but then your discounting curve is arbitrary.
The most rigorous way to go would be to set some kind of future goal, and then work your way backwards to find some kind of statistical description of the shortest path there, or else set some kind of future metric at a specific time and find the path that maximises it. This is pretty much how you design your investing portfolio, just with money instead of labour.
spend three hours figuring out/remembering how you set it up in the first place
I mean, you could also leave comments in your code, but that's just me
My comments:
// Do not change this timeout value. There's a compatibility issue that causes requests to hang. Come back later to add details
// Should probably refactor this bit
// drunk, fix later
Just one layer removed from the problem.
"WTF does this comment even mean?"
It's more than that for me. I typically hate doing repetitive tasks but I love automating them and seeing my scripts or apps run or just checking a dashboard feels better.
That does factor in on top of the time savings, definitely
If a task takes 10 minutes to do manually that doesn't mean I'll start now, it might take me more than 10 days to start - so automating it is the faster way for me to get the task done.
Just use this chart and you're set
Even better, now you can automate it with AI, so that it’s both very fragile and dependent on a paid subscription to work.
Yeah but since you didn't write it you won't remember you generated it and you'll just have the LLM spit something else out the next time you need it.
Software brain.
