Been coding for about 30 years now, am I the only one who still LIKES to code? Who still LIKES to try writing a new approach to something, watching it fail, figuring out what went wrong, taking notes, learning from mistakes, and noticing improvements in their own code? Cuz it’s starting to feel like it. Web development already lost me with the culture of “glue a bunch of bulky shit together that you didn’t write and call yourself a ‘dev’ to the ladies” but this AI shit is getting absurd. And it doesn’t even work! Look at how shitty all the operating systems are getting. Look at all the total slop on the app stores. It’s depressing as hell.
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.
i wrote 4000 lines of code to make sure the AI generated 100 lines of code correctly.
What he is describing is what you are supposed to do for human written code also.
I’ll do all that when the spec is written in stone.
The clean-coding craftsman himself.
Desperate for attention.
“Claude, no function should be more than one or two lines long” lol
Of all of Uncle Bob’s sins, short functions are the least.
I saw an argument today that was presented in a very rage inducing way but in the end I had to agree that it wasn’t the worst of takes: your code won’t get any worse just because you let the infinite slop machine have a go at trying to find problems in it.
There could be a million other reasons not to use AI but if your only argument against it is that you don’t trust the code written by AI to be good enough to be included in your code base, then you’re just not thinking about every way that the clankers can be put to work.
I’m not arguing in favor of using AI by bringing this up. If you’re morally opposed to it then this point makes absolutely no difference.
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.
I trust it as far as I can code it. I use Claude to point out errors all day. I use it to take a lot of the tedious typing out and generally speed up the development process. I don’t use it to think for me. That would be stupid.
I had a discussion with my boss today about potential ways to write code with AI and have confidence in the results without reviewing every line. You’d also have to automate the reviews in some way, and therefore also a way to confirm that the reviewer AIs are working properly, etc. The conversation discouraged me because it made me feel like I’ll end up being a manager of AIs who write the code and test cases, and I’ll just be an ape who manually tests some of the behavior before approving it for release. This is essentially what managers have been doing with human development and QA engineers in the past, but even so, I have a really hard time letting go and not reviewing every line of code myself.
Hey, you leave the legend, John Candy, outta this! 🥰
Isn’t this just the natural evolution of TDD? Write tests, pass them, don’t care about how garbage the code is to make them pass
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) ?
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If it’s stupid but it works it’s still stupid and you’re lucky
And, if you deploy/share it, you’re both lucky and stupid. ☝🏼
Well, the luck’ll invariably run out on that path, but the stupid certainly seems tenacious.
If you do all that properly using an LLM is a waste of time.
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
Is this an “I am a very stable genius” confession for sloperators, or is there something I’m missing? 🤔
The tests that the AI wrote? :D
Sure this is bad, but is it really “becoming even worse” after he already publicly declared support for Trump?
Say this stupid bullshit was true: you’re spending so much time baby minding the fucking thing that you’re not saving time?!? I don’t doubt that slop generators can code. But can they generate good code AND save you time? No.
Sadly, it’s the time “saved” the majority are after. No Imposter Syndrome necessary; they know they’re dogshit and everyone else does, too.
I don’t code any more, only write gazillions of tests smugface.jpg
Yeah,his avatar looks like evil Stephen King
Evil Kingstevel
It’s crazy how >99% of his works have a vehicle crash in them, but he’s primarily famous for his illogical leaps.
None of this actually proves that they aren’t writing slop. It just proves that the slop that they’ve written passes your tests.
Never ask a vibe coder about their code’s performance.
This never happens to me, I swear. Just, gimme a second… Tell me how good I am. I’m so right. Say it. Almost there.
It’s not his tests. It’s the ai writing tests.
I never understand why you wouldn’t want to read the code. I prevent a massive amount of correct slop by just skimming. The LLM will 10 times out of 10 never ask “this code will be a massive duplication of exact same behavior, do you want to refractor it?” because it’s trained to finish a task without asking if possible.
Uncle Bob now writes code for his tests instead of tests for his code. I know it’s TDD but it always seemed backwards to me.
Unit tests for logic, integration tests for outside apis, e2e for features is the sweet spot IMO.
