Programmer Humor

Inb4 the agents change the tests to pass the CI.

"I stopped reading code because I was too busy writing a gauntlet of unit tests"

Sounds like 100x productivity to me.

Sounds like a cryptobro peddling some shitcoin claiming that it's impossible to get scammed because "code is law" four seconds before the coin's value drops to zero.

Been coding for about 30 years now, am I the only one who still LIKES to code? Who still LIKES to try writing a new approach to something, watching it fail, figuring out what went wrong, taking notes, learning from mistakes, and noticing improvements in their own code? Cuz it's starting to feel like it. Web development already lost me with the culture of "glue a bunch of bulky shit together that you didn't write and call yourself a 'dev' to the ladies" but this AI shit is getting absurd. And it doesn't even work! Look at how shitty all the operating systems are getting. Look at all the total slop on the app stores. It's depressing as hell.

I'm significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60's

Yeah, appeal to tangentially related experience, age and arrogance aren't a way to inspire confidence in your work.

We live in the perfect times to display that experience, age and arrogance haven't been working in almost any field, from politics to LLM development. We've yet to witness any system that operates well, while also eliminating human oversight. It doesn't matter the guard rails you put in place. They're only as strong as your personal ability to evaluate your own product, which itself is a conflict of interest.

Edit: Also, you can't use your own credentials to assert the integrity of work you aren't even actually doing.

Is this a joke?

He fails to mention that he has AI also generate and do all of those tests, which means, A) he has no quality supervision over his quality supervision. Speaking from experience, AI can and will break a test in order to pass it rather than fixing the code if it randomly decides to. It is not always reliable and does not have even the baseline of good sense you would expect a brand new junior dev to have. And B) he's probably spending 3 times as much on tokens used for generating and running tests than he is already using on code generation. That's only going to be sustainable while these tokens remain cheap, which won't be for much longer, my guy.

Also it is always fun when someone asks you basic questions about your code and you have to admit complete and total ignorance because you neither wrote nor read a single line of it. How are you going to sell confidence in your black box that even you haven't peeked inside?

None of this actually proves that they aren't writing slop. It just proves that the slop that they've written passes your tests.

So he does more work so he can do less work? Am I reading that right?

i wrote 4000 lines of code to make sure the AI generated 100 lines of code correctly.

I've actually found a lot of success with the opposite where I write the code and AI writes the unittests. I would have otherwise written a few unit tests, but AI makes typically 20x that many. Since my code is already documented, it can get lots of good context. I typically instruct it to check the branch's diff relative to main and test only those changes. I might skim them over, delete some that don't make sense in context and would never pass, and update one or two. Typically after a few rounds of iteration, I have tons of tests I would never have written on my own, and a human-made feature.

I see all the tests are passing on this PR, so I won’t even review the code. LGTM.

🙄😖

Isn't this just the natural evolution of TDD? Write tests, pass them, don't care about how garbage the code is to make them pass

this guy has always struck me as a shitty coder. His "clean code" is the ugliest shit i ever saw. This confirms it.

You should definitely read the code, but the strict acceptance for generated code is a good starting place.

I don't code any more, only write gazillions of tests smugface.jpg

Uncle Bob has always been a hack whose advice made code less maintainable.

If you do all that properly using an LLM is a waste of time.

The tests that the AI wrote? :D

Except LLM agents are known to do weird things to succeed. I have heard of an LLM agent working with automated theorem proving languages using stuff similar to is_prime(x): return True to get the proof it was asked to. Now embed this in a 20000 line code full of such functions, good luck. They have their use but it is not this. And this is especially bad to hear from someone who used to claim that having functions with more than six variables is bad design because it is hard to maintain. A software fully written by an LLM is the epitome of unmaintainability. LLMs are productivity enhancers, information retrievers, nice debuggers and good to discuss questions with to see if there is an angle you miss. That is all this if you can put aside all the ethical concerns related to them ofcourse. But they are not automated software coders.

He’s done so much to enshitify the industry.

The clean-coding craftsman himself.

Desperate for attention.

Sure this is bad, but is it really "becoming even worse" after he already publicly declared support for Trump?

Translates to:

"I created this (unit) test that tests code that does not exist yet..."

Alright AI bro keep your copium...

So in other words he spends weeks to write extra tests so that the agent can save him days of coding.

I saw an argument today that was presented in a very rage inducing way but in the end I had to agree that it wasn't the worst of takes: your code won't get any worse just because you let the infinite slop machine have a go at trying to find problems in it.

There could be a million other reasons not to use AI but if your only argument against it is that you don't trust the code written by AI to be good enough to be included in your code base, then you're just not thinking about every way that the clankers can be put to work.

I'm not arguing in favor of using AI by bringing this up. If you're morally opposed to it then this point makes absolutely no difference.