Programmer Humor

Guys, you can laugh at a joke. The AI doesn't win just because someone upvoted a meme. Maintainability of codebases has been a joke for longer than LLMs have been around because there's a lot of truth to it.

Even the most well intentioned design has weaknesses that we didn't see coming. Some of its abstractions are wrong. There are changes to the requirements and feature set that they didn't anticipate. They over engineered other parts that make them more difficult to navigate for no maintainability gain. That's ok. Perfectly maintainable code requires us to be psychics and none of us are.

Yes, and so can most experienced developers. In fact unmaintainable human-written code is more often caused by organisational dysfunctions than by lack of individual competence.

No, so let's vibe unmaintainable code together!

I mean, yes, absolutely I can. So can my peers. I've been doing this for a long, long time, as have my peers.

The code we produce is many times more readable and maintainable than anything an LLM can produce today.

That doesn't mean LLMs are useless, and it also doesn't mean that we're irreplaceable. It just means this argument isn't very effective.

If you're comparing an LLM to a Junior developer? Then absolutely. Both produce about the same level of maintainable code.

But for Senior/Principal level engineers? I mean this without any humble bragging at all: but we run circles around LLMs from the optimization and maintainability standpoint, and it's not even close.

This may change in the future, but today it is true (and I use all the latest Claude Code models)

Pretty sure I can, considering I’m still maintaining a project I originally started in 2009, which is a core component of my email service.

Maybe the real slop was the code we wrote along the way

I might not be the best, but I can still do a better job than AI

When that coworker tells you "hah you must have generated this" but you coded this yourself 👀

Yes, but only I can maintain it.

ITT: AI induced dunning-kruger. Everybody can write maintenable code, just somehow it happens that nobody does.

Yes. That's literally the first point in my job description.

Yes.

The code I wrote before LLMs was maintainable, because it was concise clean code.

The code I've let LLMS write for me, unless I spend 30x as long telling it to do it right, is a verbose unreadable noisy spray.

Yes.

10 PRINT 'Hello World!'

20 GOTO 10

EZ

Yes.

yes. yes I can. been doing it for 25 years.

I could.

I choose not to! Take that, LLM!

Why would you tell on yourself like this?

Yes.

More maintainable that whatever shit it put out

Frankly I believe it can be maintainable if the person doing the prompting actually does something and correctly do their role of human reviewing and correcting. Vibe coding without any review is dooming the software maintainability

Evasive deflection.

I'm ass at coding and I still can, lmao

Yes

This attack must go against the laws of robotics.

I can produce NI-slop on my own. I don't need AI to do it for me.

I can maintain any code I write myself, so long as I look at it at least once every month

I would like to think that I'm capable of writing maintainable code like seemingly everyone else in this thread, and I have multiple code bases that have existed for decades that have included necessary updates over time to reinforce that opinion.

I've also seen some truly unfathomable, Lovecraftian horror code in the wild that has persisted for decades.

Seeing Will Smith's character as a representative of humanity, and Sonny as a representative of LLM/GenAI in that context makes this joke absolutely hilarious.

You don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other guy.

I think most devs here can out-maintainable-code an llm.