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Ah yes, readable code… if you’re fluent in Ancient Developer.
The moment when you realize you wrote it.
𓎼𓏏 𓎼𓂧
gitgud
getgood
reach better[ment]
I get regularly complimented on my code for how understandable it is radiates smugness
It’s ChatGPT that’s commenting this, isn’t it?
who the fuck wrote this garbage
me. its just me every time.
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What idiot wrote this? It’s complete nonsense… Oh right.
I forget which extension it is but the thing that shows a faint git blame at the end of the line under cursor in VS Code has been… humbling.
Why the fuck would I do this? This is nonsense. This way is way better.
*half an hour later, when I run into a major, strangely familiar bug*
Ooooohhhh!
That’s when a “here be dragons” comment needs to be added.
A bird in a mouth is worth two in Shepherds Bush
Is that Wise?
could be
A skilled programmer can make self documenting code, so I always document mine.
Nah. No code actually documents itself. Ever. Anyone who says they can is an idiot that doesn’t understand the purpose of comments and docs.
Code can never describe intent, context, or consequences unless you read every line of code in every library and framework used, and every external call. Especially if they aren’t doing “fail fast” correctly.
// Prints "Hello World!" to the screen printf("Hello World!");I did not say comments should directly explain what the code is obviously attempting to do.
My favorite thing about the “all comments are bad” crowd is that their first example is almost always something like this:
// Add 1 to x x = x + 1Like, nobody that thinks comments are good and important would ever add a useless comment like that. The point of commenting is to add documentation (usually the only form of documentation that a future developer is ever going to read) only to code that would otherwise be inscrutable.
You’d think that, and yet I’ve once worked in a project in a fortune 500 company that basically wouldn’t even compile if we didn’t add comments like that. No kidding the compiler enforced specific comment patterns so if you had a line do
x = x + 1, it would not compile if it was not preceded by a comment that started with “Add” and included “1” and “to x”. Even in dev mode if you wanted to just try something you had to comment everything.The original dev was super proud of this tools that generated HTML documentation about everything based on those comments. And the whole documentation was stuff like:
*price*: The priceEvery good idea can be taken to a ridiculous extreme.
and that… is ridiculous.
I inherited a code base probably written by a squirrel, and the first thing I did was to write documentation on infrastructure, business logic, architecture, deployment and whatever. I had to read everything anyways, because the guy handing it over had no idea what it did and left the company shortly after. It’s fine now, but that path was horrible.
/* By all accounts, the logic in this method shouldn't work. And yet it does. We do not know why. It makes no sense whatsoever. It took three weeks and numerous offerings to the programming gods, including using one of the junior devs as a human sacrifice, to unlock this knowledge. DO NOT LET HIS VIOLENT AND UNTIMELY DEATH BE IN VAIN! Touch this at your own peril. --jubilationtcornpone 12/17/25 */ public async Task<IResult> CalculateResultAsync() { // Some ass backwards yet miraculously functional logic. }–jubilationtcornpone
He led the retreat that saved our town!
That long-ass horizontal scroll bar reminds me of how I used to put unfindable easter eggs into my Visual Basic apps. I would have amusing little messages pop up from time to time in message boxes. To prevent anyone from just searching for the exact text in the message box, I would reduce it to a series of concatenated Chr() statements and then I would put like 200 characters of whitespace in front of the message box call. The only way anybody would spot it would be if they noticed the horizontal scroll bar this produced and nobody ever did.
At least that’s my theory. It’s also possible that nobody ever used the software that I produced.
A friend of mine used to teach coding decades ago and one story I’ll never forget is about the student who had an assignment that asked for a “for” loop to be used, but they didn’t quite know how to use it so they just wrote a broken loop there and then hid a “while” loop at the far end of the line.
Code compiled, had a “for” loop and had the right output.
I’m living this right now. The lead programmers are long gone for a setup that uses Python, C++, and Linux. The only other guy who knows it is pulled to three other projects and I only have a C++ class taken over 15 years ago under my belt. I’m somehow expected to decipher this shit and explain the function of a few dozen variables and it’s going as well as one might expect.
Fixed:
Every time.
The main reason I put effort into comments
Now do one for PL/SQL.
I have left this as an exercise for the reader.
The only times I’ve seen devs do inline comments in their code is when it’s been done by AI, and I can tell it’s AI because the comments are all useless and describing what’s happening, not why.
// Format user object function formatUserObject(user) {I’ve seen lots of such crap written by humans. I guess AI had to learn it from somewhere.
AI mostly learned it from programming tutorials and things like documentation and Q&A forums like StackOverflow. People often add comments in those cases to explain to somebody not familiar with code what is happening so they can learn from it.
In actual code written by people who write code for a living I’d hope the comments are much more useful and usually not as prevalent.
I actually got really clean, well commented code from Copilot earlier this week.
I have no experience with JavaScript to speak of, but realized a Bookmarklet would be a perfect solution for reformatting a particular arcuate for printing. I already had a head replacement with CSS to do all the formatting, and I was using a RegEx to strip all script tags.
Anyway, I asked Copilot to write the Bookmarklet to replace the header, with full contents explaining the training behind the code, and an explanation of how the script functions below. When I got an error, I asked if to fix the error and or identified that Bookmarklets work better as single lines, so it fixed it. Then I added the requirement about replacing scripts, and it did that too, but for commented and a clean one-line version.
The one-live versions even up getting truncated, so I need to copy/paste from earlier (correct) endings, but otherwise it was an incredibly smooth experience.
I spent longer writing the guide for how to use it than the time it took to vibe code it and test it. I was super impressed.
(Granted, that’s a pretty easy coding task…)
no JavaScript experience
knows what a bookmarklet is
no experience with JavaScript to speak of
You claim no JavaScript experience, declare confident in the comments and include any examples.
All you’ve really said here is you vibed coded a solution to a problem using one of the most common languages without knowing the language. And made claims you do not attempt to prove.
I know enough to parse the code, especially with the comments. It was a logical algorithm, it worked, and it was just for reformatting a sure to print cleanly, so there was basically no rush if it didn’t work. I code for work, I just don’t know JavaScript syntax or functions.
Anyway, I was impressed it actually worked. I’m an AI skeptic, which is why I thought it was noteworthy to get well documented, clean, functional code from vibe coding—even in such a trivial context as swapping a head tag and removing script tags.
a trivial context as swapping a head tag and removing script tags.
Very curious what it actually generated here because that sounds really basic but as coders we tend to downplay complexity when describing things (why our documentation is often bad) so maybe it’s more than just some trivial dom manipulation.
// 🚨 Log error to console console.error(error);I once tried vibe coding a web app using GitHub Copilot. That motherfucker wrapped every single endpoint with
try: ... except Exception: return "An error occurred"What the fuck is wrong with you Copilot? This piece of shit trying to hide all the errors. If I don’t know there are errors then there aren’t errors. Apparently
It’s actually kind of hilarious how closely it mimics a human programmer who just sucks at it.
I wish to god Visual Basic was still around so Copilot et. al. could get infected with
ON ERROR RESUME NEXTstatements. Or its under-appreciated but vastly more horrific cousinON ERROR RESUME.I might make that my first coding project after I retire. I bet I can code up a global import that implements “ON ERROR RESUME” in a couple of modern languages…
// 🤦 You are totally right! Simply logging the 🚨 error to the console isn't proper error handling. 🫣 We now throw an exception instead. throw new ApplicationException(error);
I sometimes suspect that I am actually an AI. I’ve always struggled with captchas and I comment my code exactly as you’ve just described.
Proper comments describe why… For example say you are using an api which requires guids and your application doesn’t care are collisions as much so just use int id’s.
You could add in a comment like
// creating a guid to interface with special api.
But just saying
// generate guid
Means nothing, your method should be generate_guid() or GenerateGuid(). Your comment is repeating.
Or this is probably going to hit my last company at some point, there was a system to read a serial number. They also wanted a “status” on the screen to verify the system was connected and running properly but both these values came over same signal wire. Depending on your exact ms timing sometimes you would read the status as the serial number. Another programmer wrote a check to verify the serial number did not start with OK. The comment added was
// add on 11/15/23 by Initials
With no other details. The serial numbers were 8 numeric digits. Someone won’t know the history and delete this seemingly useless check and cause a 10s of 1000s of dollars in loss
I used to write it all the steps I thought I’d need as these types of comments, then go back and write the real methods. But I usually replaced the comments with more detailed jsdocs style comments with as much detail about the parameters as returnvalues as possible.
Then I quit web dev and moved to the woods.
Yeah effectively using comments as psuedocode
yeah, I put rules to highly discourage comments entirely when generating code
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Who wrote this shit?!
Oh, it was me. Last month.
Decoding hieroglyphs with an English dictionary should do the work.
Especially helpful that it is written right to left. Maybe the Manga version of the English dictionary.
It is not.
Wait until you write code that is self-hosting!
