Programmer Humor

My company is doing a big push for LLM/codegen/“everyday ‘AI’”

Sorry - threw up in my mouth a little bit there

And pretty much the only thing I acquiesce to using is the “better autocomplete” feature. Most of the other stuff it seems to offer is essentially useless on a day-to-day basis for me.

And moreover, it’s actively harmful to the entire practice of engineering, because management and execs see it as this magical oracle/panopticon that can magically make people more productive and churn out 10x more bullshit products that they didn’t consult with engineers on than before. It can’t and it doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop them from thinking it can.

And then they stop hiring junior levels because “codegen can do that”. And then you have a generational gap in the entire fucking discipline of coding as an art, because the entire fucking tech industry is doing this. And we haven’t even touched on the ecological and infrastructural (as in: water and power, not “which cloud or bare metal do we put this on”) implications and how they’re being blatantly ignored and hand-waved away, or the comical license and usage violations that are perfectly fine when large companies do but you’ve been a naughty boy if you torrent a fucking movie. But I digress.

I really like the description of AI coding as 'custom stack overflow generator' because it really sells the flaws as well, to an experienced dev. We go to stack overflow for help with some weird quirk of a language or find an obscure library that solves our specific need.

I think vibe coding is cobbling together a project from a bunch of stack overflow posts -- and they only use the question part of the post.

I'm just using AI to get me the damn standard library function I want to use but can't remember. Way faster than clicking through a couple links of a search result for it.

An HtML class ten years ago isn’t anything close to knowing how to program. It’s like saying “I wrote a bullet point lost years ago so I know how to write a novel.”

I'm currently doing this with an angular project that's a bit of a clusterfuck. So many layers.

I'm still having to break it down into much, much smaller chunks and it's not able to do much, but it is helpful. Most useful thing was that I started with writing a pure SQL query with several joins and told it "turn this into linq using existing entities".

I think they'll completely replace ORMs.

Sure, it can be useful for people who do know how to program, though I find it usually takes more effort to get it to create what I want and make sure it works than it takes to just do it myself.

This guy explicitly says he doesn't know how to program though. He says he took an HTML (not a programming language, a markdown language) class a decade ago. He probably doesn't remember shit from it, not that it'd be helpful anyway because writing HTML has nothing to do with writing a program to perform a task.

Does it save a ton of time? No, but it's still helpful, and can get you up and running in a new language much faster than the alternative.

You obviously aren't a programmer. You either know how to program or you don't. The language is just syntax, which is trivial to learn. It doesn't help you get running in a new language because you still need to learn the syntax to make sure it's writing something reasonable. That time has to be spent no matter what.