Programmer Humor

Right there with you. I suck at it but I still find the pursuit worthwhile!

This crap is brought to you by the people who are positively baffled that someone would want to learn to make music, and enjoy the process, instead of just have it generated so they can hit "publish" and supposedly be making money off of it with zero real effort besides "having an idea."

Reject their web development culture and make your own sites that run smoothly on devices using a fraction of the bandwidth theirs do.

I had the same problem with translating back in the day. I really liked tackling a text in a foreign language. In the end all the pros of computer-aided translation boiled down to lining the pockets of translation agencies with even more money while paying translators peanuts.

I love coding and learning new languages. I'd rather move to another industry than reviewing vibe coded crap all day long.

I too enjoy actually writing code. I feel fortunate that I was able to make a career out of something I enjoy so much. I am not sure that most people had that experience. Alas, it seems like the industry is paying me to set up guardrails and supervise AI agents. I am not sure how long this will last, but at least I know that I will always be able to enjoy programming as a hobby if nothing else.

I also do. One unique important thing that agents rob you of is time with your code - you don't get to craft it so you remember just as well as you would have if you copied answers for a test.

What he is describing is what you are supposed to do for human written code also.

“Claude, no function should be more than one or two lines long” lol

AI for code review is, I am pained to admit, a genuinely extremely pleasant addition to my workflow - it inherently is a process that involves humans checking it's work, and that kind of pattern recognition is one of the things that AI models are actually proficient at. It's for sure not bullet proof and it's pretty rare for it to catch something real that I wasn't already aware of, but it takes no time, doesn't touch my code directly and does pick up tiny errors like fenceposts or bad typing that make up the majority of my time when I'm running things down manually.

Almost all of my LLM usage is for that as well, I can't wait for it to become more sustainable, but it's definitely useful for that.

But if the ai writes the tests and you don't read them, how would you know if that's 100 lines of assertTrue(true) ?

That doesn't follow. What I think you mean is that by defining the constraints so rigorously, you've basically solved the problem yourself. But that's exactly the point. The LLM isn't the problem solver, it's the execution engine that does the wiring-up and the ticking of boxes. The easy part, arguably, sure. But still considerable effort that can be saved, and that effort may be better spent on the problem-solving + constraint-defining stage.

Mandatory disclaimer that this is not a pro-AI post. I also don't agree that this setup works, anyway. It's a classic Bob Martinism, the idea that writing good enough specifications makes the implementation irrelevant; it's the type of idea that is allergic to reality

Sadly, it's the time "saved" the majority are after. No Imposter Syndrome necessary; they know they're dogshit and everyone else does, too.