Programmer Humor

They have no idea what else to do. They were in over their head so long before this problem happened.

https://casp.ac/__l5e/assets-v1/8e5796ad-c373-4dea-8470-466263cd2125/ai-enabled-terrorism-report.pdf

We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.

Grain of salt: these people probably lied to the researchers but it is still hilarious

Seriously, has no one heard of sandboxing?

Having working production database config and credentials in your local .env, as appears to be the case here, is equally wild, and basically begging for something like this to happen.

Prod should always be highly "air gapped" with some sort of deployment process which tests not only the code to be deployed but also the deployment itself. I've been doing QA for a good while now, and everywhere I've worked has testers dedicated to testing the actual update process to make sure it will be safe when deployed.

What evaluation setup lets the thing being tested see the test results and gives access to the test source code?!

Slop evaluating slop.

That takes me back to 2004

No Smoke, by unknown,

Tech: "Hello. How can I help you today?"

Customer: "There's smoke coming from the power supply on my computer."

Tech: "Sounds like you need a new power supply."

Customer: "No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files."

Tech: "Sir, what you describe is a faulty power supply. You need to replace it."

Customer: "No way! Someone told me that I just had to change the system startup files to fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the right command."

(Ten minutes later...)

Tech: "Well, we don’t normally tell our customers this, but there's an undocumented command that will fix the problem. Add the line "LOAD NOSMOKE.COM" at the end of the CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine."

(Five minutes later...)

Customer: "It didn’t work. The power supply is still smoking."

Tech: "Well, what version of Windows are you using?"

Customer: "Windows 98."

Tech: "Well, that's your problem. That version of Windows doesn't include NOSMOKE. You'll need to contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch."

(When nearly an hour had passed, the phone rang again...)

Customer: "I need a new power supply."

Tech: "How did you come to that conclusion?"

Customer: "Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what you said, and he started asking me questions about the make of the power supply."

Tech: "What did he tell you?"

Customer: "He said my power supply is not compatible with NOSMOKE."

That's hilarious, idk i think llm could be useful for helping product folks translate their thoughts into actionable items for the devs, but yeah like beyond insane to tell the product people to hop on claude and do it themselves. That's like a construction company letting the sales team jump in an excavator and start digging!!

Having production credentials in a dev environment is more stupider but they'll never learn because they outsourced their thinking.

Creating an environment that incentivizes not thinking is peak stupid.

What's the point of AI if you need qualified review?

Claude code even added an auto mode so that you don't get blocked by that pesky reviewing anymore. Since then, the usual mode of asking before running a command, for instance when the thing wants to read the entire codebase looking for information only available in an online doc, is now called manual mode; the non 10x developer mode.