Hey, you leave the legend, John Candy, outta this! π₯°
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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Is this an "I am a very stable genius" confession for sloperators, or is there something I'm missing? π€
People don't want to hear it, but this should be more common practice especially for human written code, and it's best if someone specializes in doing this sort of QA testing specifically.
"I stopped reading code because I was too busy writing a gauntlet of unit tests"
Sounds like 100x productivity to me.
Edit: also, general note - I think you kneecap your argument when you start with "I'm older than you".
There is a 0% chance he wrote all those tests himself anyway
I hope he at least read them.
He didn't, but he has unit tests for them.
Made me laugh out loud, ty
Claude summarized 'em
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Inb4 the agents change the tests to pass the CI.
literally seen an agent do a: "oh now the tests aren't passing" deletes all tests in the file
Or my Claude favorite, βoh youβre right? I did blow past that restraint and did something I was not supposed to, sooooorrrrreyyyyyβ
assert(true);
assert(true);
assert(true);
assert(true);
assert(true);
Look at all the pretty green check marks!
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Why am I not surprised that he is a big proponent of AI coding considering his background ...
Translates to:
"I created this (unit) test that tests code that does not exist yet..."
Alright AI bro keep your copium...
Test driven development is not a new concept...
Designing your unit tests before you've written your algorithm is - in my experience - a bit ass backwards.
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Sounds like a cryptobro peddling some shitcoin claiming that it's impossible to get scammed because "code is law" four seconds before the liquidity pool gets drained through a vulnerability in the code.
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He fails to mention that he has AI also generate and do all of those tests, which means, A) he has no quality supervision over his quality supervision. Speaking from experience, AI can and will break a test in order to pass it rather than fixing the code if it randomly decides to. It is not always reliable and does not have even the baseline of good sense you would expect a brand new junior dev to have. And B) he's probably spending 3 times as much on tokens used for generating and running tests than he is already using on code generation. That's only going to be sustainable while these tokens remain cheap, which won't be for much longer, my guy.
Also it is always fun when someone asks you basic questions about your code and you have to admit complete and total ignorance because you neither wrote nor read a single line of it. How are you going to sell confidence in your black box that even you haven't peeked inside?
The D Language Foundation tried to incorporate LLMs in the unittests, and they created something akin to assert(5 + (funcToTest(846) * 0) == 5) early on, now they want to use it to rewrite the standard library from scratch, because "it has become better since".
The other day I had Claude write some code that failed a unit test. It was failing at a step that ran assertEquals(actualMap, expectedMap);. The reason it was failing was because one of the values in the map, a UUID, is automatically generated in the code. In the test, it has been hard coded.
Anyone with any sense would know you need to handle that misalignment. Omit that field from the match assertion? Set that UUID based on the generated value instead of hardcoding it? Anything like that would work just fine.
But Claud's solution was to change that assertion to assertTrue("The actualMap and expectedMap will never be equal because the values of ID will never match");. So the test always passes and it explicitly notes that they will not match. I would have fired a Junior Dev on the spot for writing that solution.
I'm significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60's
Yeah, appeal to tangentially related experience, age and arrogance aren't a way to inspire confidence in your work.
We live in the perfect times to display that experience, age and arrogance haven't been working in almost any field, from politics to LLM development. We've yet to witness any system that operates well, while also eliminating human oversight. It doesn't matter the guard rails you put in place. They're only as strong as your personal ability to evaluate your own product, which itself is a conflict of interest.
Edit: Also, you can't use your own credentials to assert the integrity of work you aren't even actually doing yet passing as your own.
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It just means he is not doing anything important, in other words he doesnt have any specific thing in mind and it doesn't matter if it works exactly right or not.
It looks like it's working and for some people that's enough.
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Has this guy ever even written any code? Can anyone name a piece of software he's worked on? Isn't he like a self-help author for programmers?
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Does he think a single AI model, perhaps in the same instance, will start to get better when put through "hard testing" in his "gauntlet"?
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Is this a joke?
No. Everyone in tech that's not a mediocre tech bro has known Uncle Bob is an overrated quack for a long time.
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Who's this guy?
A guy, who made programming worse, especially in enterprise settings.
People don't like tracing what something is doing across seven 12-line functions spread through multiple files?
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Depends on which parts you look at. There is plenty that he wrote about that have made coding enjoyable, but yes, also plenty that is the opposite.
I never saw his book as a bible though. I always thought of it as a "here are possibly good ideas, see which you and your team likes".