I recently got moved to another team after my company restructured. Several repos have zero documentation. Most of those don't even have comments on the functions. LinkXxxx(some args) like Xxxx to /what?!/ It's also an over-engineered mess with multiple layers of abstraction. I can't wait to finish figuring out what everything does and re-write (and document it) like a sane person. This code presumably had no AI involvement which I'd argue is even worse since real humans made these shit decisions. Don't get me starting on their testing (and mostly lack thereof)...

Worker suggested using AI to write some documentation. Another coworker did. I immediately spotted a bunch of hallucinated shit. Good times. I want to know in my head what a thing does, how it works, and how it fits into the architecture. I can't do that if an AI is just deciding stuff; it's like a quiz back in school where I would memorize shit for about one week before 99% of it left my brain forever.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Sometimes documentation doesn't help. My workplace used to be waterfall and we still have systems analysts producing documentation

One piece of work came to my team as "this calculation fails in this case and we can't tell why"

Looking at it there were two updates in the documentation showing updates ten years ago the first fixing that corner case with the second fixing a side effect of the fix

Why didn't it work? It was never built, or perhaps built but never merged

On the good side we have an excellent plan for how to fix that corner case, on the bad side we aren't funded to do that amount of work so we have to half arse a solution

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 1 points 4 days ago

The documentation I mean here should be in the repo and checked as a part of the PR process. I don't mean it should be a manual, I just mean a readme should at least describe what the service does (it has such a generic name in my case that it's not self-evident and is so broad in scope I don't know what happened). The functions also have terrible naming and no comments to describe what they do. So, as a guy just coming into this team after re-org with no idea what all this stuff does, I was completely lost. They also changed which services which teams owned, further making it difficult to get knowledge.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

The code is the comment anyway. The only thing you should comment is things that are way the hell out in left field about why that bit of code exists when it shouldn't.

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

Kill Bill. Wait...

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (4 children)

A lot of the arguments people use against vibe coding sounds a lot like "You shouldn't use a high-level programming language unless you understand the assembly it compiles to."

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[–] SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

I think I know who did that meme. We had a programmer by that name who did just that.

[–] jcorvera@quokk.au 2 points 5 days ago

And suddenly, I'm reminded of JoCo's "Code Monkey".

[–] dandylion@lemmy.today 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I hate Bills, taking all my money.

[–] Hisse@programming.dev 1 points 5 days ago

But he isn't the Microsoft ceo anymore

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

I hate most of the companies paying people to write code though, isn't it a good thing if their code is shit that no one can understand and doomed to collapse under its own weight?

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