Programmer Humor

My path was working for a consulting firm (Accenture) for a few years, making friends with my clients, and then jumping to freelance work a few years later when I can get paid my contract rate directly rather than letting Accenture take a big chunk of it.

Answer is probably the same as before AI: build a portfolio on GitHub. These days maybe try to find repos that have vibe code in them and make commits that fix the AI garbage.

The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.

It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”

Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.

Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.

Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.

There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.

My boss is literally convinced we can now basically make programs that take rockets to mars, and that it's literally clicks away. For the life of me, it is impossible to convince him that this is, in fact, not the case. Whoever fired developers because 'AI could do it' is going to regret it.

When I want to be lazy and make some simple excel macros is about the most iv trusted it with that it manages to do with out fucking up and taking more time then just doing it my self.

I don't think it has much to do with how "complex or not" it is, but rather how common it is.

It can completely fail on very simple things that are just a bit obscure, so it has too little training data.

And it can do very complex things if there's enough training data on those things.

I've also found it useful for simple Python scripts when I need to analyze data. I don't use pandas/scipy/numpy/matplotlib enough to remember the syntax and library functions. With vibe coding it, I can have a script in minutes for reading a csv with weird timestamps, scale some of the channels, filter out noise or detrending, perform a Fourier transform, and do a curve fit towards a model.

But then obviously I know every intermediate step I want to do.

The most amazing thing about vibe coding is that in my 20 odd years of professional programming the thing I’ve had to beg and plead for the most was code reviews.

Everyone loves writing code, no one it seems much enjoyed reading other people’s code.

Somehow though vibe coding (and the other LLM guided coding) has made people go “I’ll skip the part where I write code, let an LLM generate a bunch of code that I’ll review”

Either people have fundamentally changed, unlikely, or there’s just a lot more people that are willing to skim over a pile of autogenerated code and go “yea, I’m sure it’s fine” and open a PR

I don't see how it would save time as someone whose job is to currently undo what "time" it "saves". You can give Claude Code the most fantastic and accurate prompt in the world but you're still going to have to explain to it how something actually works when it gets to the point, and it will, that it starts contradicting itself and over complicating things.

You said yourself he has to reiterate through the code with the LLM to get something that works. If he already knows it, he could just write it. Having to explain to something HOW to write what you ALREADY know can't possibly be saving time. it's Coding with extra steps.

I don't think it saves time. You spend more time trying to explain why it's wrong and how the llm should take the next approach, at which point it actually would've been faster to read documentation and do it yourself. At least then you'll understand what the code is even further.

I do the same, I am not sure if it saves time. Some times not. Other times if it is a task I really don’t want to work on this helps me to get started and break through procreation

Oh man, I love ChatGPT for one thing in particular: "Hey chatbot, is there some library or standard library function for that very specific, yet still kinda generic thing I'm trying to do, so that I don't have to write it myself?"

It does frequently give a helpful answer. That is, it doesn't give me working code, but a helpful pointer to some manual where I can find good instructions for how to use the thing to solve my problem.

I don't want to dismiss your point overall, but I see that example so often and it irks me so much.

Unit tests are your specification. So, 1) ideally you should write the specification before you implement the functionality. But also, 2) this is the one part where you really should be putting in your critical thinking to work out what the code needs to be doing.

An AI chatbot or autocomplete can aid you in putting down some of the boilerplate to have the specification automatically checked against the implementation. Or you could try to formulate the specification in plaintext and have an AI translate it into code. But an AI without knowledge of the context nor critical thinking cannot write the specification for you.

That comes up in that sub occasionally and people offer it as a service. It's 2 different universes in there - people who are like giving a child a Harry Potter toy wand that think they're magic, and then a stage magician with 20 years of experience doing up close slight-of-hand magic that takes work to learn, telling the kid "you're not doing what you think you're doing here" and then the kid starts to cry and their friends come over and try to berate the stage magician and shout that he's wrong because Hagrid said Harry's a wizard and if you have the plastic wand that goes "bbbring!" you're Harry Potter.

When I see a sloppy PR I remind people “AI didn’t write that. You wrote it. Your name is on the git blame.”