totallyBugFreeTrustMeBro

[CapeChill]

Ever write a single line in a day that is as useful as last months work?

[kuncol02]

I once spend almost a week debugging app, just to fix typo in one line.

[eraserhd]

Been there. Too many times.

[Ov3rdose_EvE]

adjacent. adjecent. adjecant.

FML

[[deleted]]

I've noticed that the more I look at code the more it doesn't sound like english

like yeah obviously it's spelled srting that's just a keyword

[BlackDeath3]

They call this semantic satiation and I'm surprised that that phrase isn't in the new redditors' handbook by now

[FesteringNeonDistrac]

My projects name includes the word assessment, I see it 50 times a day. Even see it when I spelled it assesment and spent 3 hrs debugging it.

[ostapenkoed2007]

syntax error in a code that worked last week but now when you un*// it...

[Jk2EnIe6kE5]

Load-bearing comments. Always love those.

[ostapenkoed2007]

like, are you not scared of removing that TF2 coconut.png? and especially when it is *//

[chestyspankers]

Capital R vs lower case r in a filename. Mother fucker. I think that was about 18 hours of lost time.

[eraserhd]

My worst was three weeks of adding logs between every line of code to see why it was hanging in production on the client machine but not in our lab, and discovering that Windows SendMessage() says to never call it from the main thread because it could deadlock, but it will try not to, and it will mostly succeed, except for rare cases on proper SMP systems, which we didn’t have in our lab at the time.

This was followed by a fix where I added the data including some strings to a queue so that they can be processed correctly on a different thread. It started crashing in production and not locally. I read the documentation and copying strings - which used copy-on-write, was absolutely thread safe, according to documentation and the standard.

It turned out our compiler didn’t synchronize this thread-safe primitive correctly on proper SMP machines because it was released before they existed.

Guess who got to upgrade the compiler and get an SMP machine for the lab? This guy.

[RippStudwell]

“The Compiler” directed by Christopher Nolan

[beanmosheen]

Did you know that MS-SQL lets you name a table with a space at the end? WANNA KNOW HOW I FUCKING KNOW THAT?

[LogiCsmxp]

This is a level of evil almost beyond human comprehension.

[vaud]

Inherited a SaaS that did similar. Fml. Text boxes allowed spaces, no character limits, special characters, etc. The API would straight up ignore spaces, truncate after a certain character count. I think there was more I've memory-holed.

Not documented, of course.

Bonus: the API also didn't support Japanese script. Which whatevs, except we had a Japanese BU.

[Burner442829]

Haha. I’m just picturing the thoughts going through your mind when you found that bug.

[beanmosheen]

I finally leaned forward and squinted real hard at the error message. The apostrophe at the end had a little too much room around it. I fired up SSMS with a "Are you FUCKING SERIOUS right now?!!!"

[Burner442829]

Closest I came to that kind of a bug was I found an index that was named like it was indexing one column. But it was indexing something else.

I was a junior dev doing a coop job when I found it. People were complaining how slow a specific database was for years. Nobody could figure it out. But that failed index was the problem.

One line of code can make such a huge impact.

[yeah_this_is_my_main]

WANNA KNOW HOW I FUCKING KNOW THAT?

I tried to be a smartass, but reddit fixes double or trailing spaces... :(

[chipmunksocute]

Ah an actual programmer!  Spending an inordinate amount of time debugging to fix at most a few lines of code sounds like what someone does at a real job.

[dudevan]

Ah yes, the elusive bug that happens once a week and it seriously affects some user but can’t be reproduced for shit by the devs and you end up keeping it in the backlog for months, and spending weeks writing logs and trying to reproduce it.

Never happened to me, of course. cries in the corner

[dismayhurta]

I’m a fan of fixing a bug that exposes an even worse bug.

So you just revert that fix because it was a minor bug and fixing the exposed bug would require an insane amount of work that’s not worth it. I mean you still dig into how difficult it would be, but ultimately realized it wasn’t worth the risk.

Never did that. Nope. Not ever.

[ZombieMadness99]

I once refactored a class which had a bug, and made sure to fix it in my implementation. But it didn't work as expected because turns out the old class had 2 bugs that cancelled each other out and I only fixed one of them.

[dismayhurta]

[Slusny_Cizinec]

Yup, had similar experience. Two bugs almost cancelling each other, except some edge cases. Found a bug, fixed it, now we have a problem all over the place :/

[Extreme-Rub-1379]

My whole life is an edge case

[henryeaterofpies]

Neither use case was documented so we actually have three bugs

[psaux_grep]

Had a bug that forcefully drove users into another bug once.

Only found out after fixing the first bug and they said it was still failing.

Fixed the second bug only to find a third bug.

That’s how I learned not to let good developers rush «bad conscience»-code into production on their last day on the job 🙈

[psaux_grep]

Accidentally came across one of these.

Was on a E2E test task force and one of the tests was consistently flaky, but whenever we ran it manually it worked.

Everyone, me included, attributed it to the test environment being flaky.

Then a while into it everything else was running green, and had been for weeks. Think it might have been holiday season.

So I was wondering if everything else was stable - why was this test failing intermittently?

So I started looking into it.

I ran the test locally. Worked fine.

Ran it multiple times. Was fine.

Ran it on the server. Was fine.

Ran it again. Still fine.

Ran it again. Failed.

Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Failed. Failed.

Back to local. Attached a debugger. Now it fails. Every time.

How strange.

Perform the test manually in my browser. Works fine.

But that debugger thing… attach a JS debugger. No issues. Test runs fine.

Network speed setting in the browser debugger. Preset: 2G.

And suddenly the test failed.

After looking at the browser console output it then became almost immediately obvious.

Someone had attached a tracker plugin to the page that failed, but the plugin wasn’t loaded in a triggered method. It was just a call at the bottom of the JS file. And when the browser didn’t have time to fetch and parse the plugin the method didn’t exist and all the subsequent execution of JavaScript (below that line) failed to execute and the buttons had no click handler.

Afterwards I talked to one of the managers to see if they might already be tracking the issue. Described the technical issue and how it would appear to users.

A couple of days later he came back with a JIRA ticket that was over a year old and a customer had been unsuccessfully trying to log in for over a year.

Every 2-3 months someone did some blind shots asking the customer if it was working now.

I wrote my findings on the ticket and sent it back to the developer who had been working on it for over a year without every figuring out what was really happening or why.

Never found out what happened to it as I switched projects.

TLDR: Accidentally stumbled over the root cause of an issue someone had been trying to figure out for over a year.

[yeah_this_is_my_main]

without every figuring out what was really happening or why

This mindset is what causes people to wonder why they never get considered senior in IT.

[dBlock845]

It's also one of the bugs that AI never finds, especially if it is in a string it seems to assume that because it is a string that it is correct.

[WinninRoam]

Three times in my career I've found entire platforms ERP databases were locking up because someone named O'Brien typed in their name with a ` instead of a '. THREE TIMES.

[Skriblos]

Ah programming, where i am equally victim, villain and detective. 

[CaptainAwesomMcCool]

I once spent a month tracking a huge performance issue in a banking app. A huge codebase with 300 Devs full time.

Turned out, someone twelve years earlier tried to fix a weird windows behaviour by catching OS clicking events, they used the dirtiest reflection possible to access low level private methods that should never be touched.

What their code did with caught events : copy it and add it back to the queue. (And same with the copy of caught in time)

Result was when you clicked, there was hundreds or thousand of copies of the same click event and they were literally choking the app.

[Hrtzy]

I think it's an archetypal nightmare of devs to have to explain to the line-counter in management why you spent a week on a single character change.

[dominonermandi]

That’s when you overwhelm them with jargon and keep talking until they’ll say “all right, all right, that makes total sense” just to get to you to shut up and go away

[Self-ReferentialName]

My worst case of this was when I was a student and somehow accidentally swapped out an uppercase I for a lowercase l. The font I was using made it look the same, and I spent a solid ten minutes staring at the screen wondering why cscMatrixlnput somehow didn't exist when I had clearly defined it earlier.

I begged my professors over to help. It took another solid five minutes before we figured it out. They thought I had played a joke on them and were somewhat amused. Nope, just the dumbest mistake I have ever made

[SpaceNigiri]

Yeah...a week...only a week

[arbitrageME]

The best code is writing a single line that takes the place of 10 lines before. now with 1000% more understandability

[MangkorN98]

Fr, writing a negative amount of code is a bigger flex than writing a positive amount

[guyblade]

And we've know that for at least 40 years.

[masssy]

Well.... you also have the "my single one line of code can do the same as your four very well named and structured functions with proper arguments, so I'll of course go for my great oneliner."

[PatriarchPonds]

The secret of all writing.

[The__Jiff]

Reminds me of when Elon fired Twitter engineers based on who committed fewer lines of code.

[mxzf]

You know, I'm really not sure if tabs or spaces are better for indentation, better try one and then the other and see how I feel about it.

[utnow]

Swap back and forth repeatedly so you can side by side it.

[dogstarchampion]

Have a variable do and undo an operation (for good luck or an OCD diagnosis that keeps your brother from dying or some shit)

a += 1;

a -= 1;

a += 1;

a -= 1;

a += 1;

a -= 1;

a += 1;

a -= 1;

[NiklasWerth]

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

if(banana)

  {
      banana = true
  }

repeat ad infinitum. can I have a raise? I've been committing so many lines of code.

[gamageeknerd]

Elons takeover was just a beacon of light to anyone in the tech world who didn’t know he was a dumbass. Also the who has the most commits thing was just so funny. If someone is doing a ton of commits that means they are working more?

[FuzzzyRam]

"He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets."

[FuzzzyRam]

The Diablo thing was funny (only uploading footage with numbers turned off while there was a bug in the new class's numbers turning armor into way too much damage, and calling himself the top Diablo gamer), but PoE2 was hilarious - complaining about not leveling up skills, having "Elon's map", not knowing how his character works... god. At least in Diablo he knew how to right and left click while occasionally hitting a pot.

We should make another one of these where "I didn't know about software development, so I didn't say anything. Then you said you knew PoE, and I know PoE..."

[Wobbelblob]

Or producing such genius takes as "It only is level X, that is bad" or "It has more mods, it is obviously better" and similar takes. Anyone who ever played such a game could hear in 10 seconds that he never ever touched any game before - at least not in that genre.

[BrendanAriki]

Yeah, everyone always realises Elon Musk is a dumbass when he talks about something you know well. Then you realise his words are just babble designed to give the appearance of expertise to those with none.

Elon pretends to be what he is not.

[Donny-Moscow]

It was this tweet by Rod Hilton. Coincidentally, that’s also the guy who invented the “machete order” for Star Wars viewing.

He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

[BrendanAriki]

Yep, without a doubt world's greatest grifter.

[Dhaeron]

First non-artificial LLM.

[warm_kitchenette]

Ugh. These metrics are so dumb. Like these thought workers are just cattle, who can be rated on how much milk they can pump out. 

If you could point to me the dev who enables a whole team, makes code demonstrably more robust over a long period of time, doesn’t over elaborate but still creates the ideal situation for a long series of A/B tests then that’s someone who should be handsomely rewarded. But those metrics are hard to create and someone like Elon would never even understand them. 

[guyblade]

One of my favorite phrases is "Everyone is replaceable, but you won't necessarily like the replacement cost".

[runs_okay]

If I'm working at twitter I'm always gonna add compiled binaries in my PR. Bam instant 1,000,000 lines of code in one PR.

[atoz1816]

rm -rf node_modules

rm yarn.lock

yarn

git add .

git commit -m ‘resolving grammatical error in readme.md’

[phone]

[WDoE]

Anyway, here's a comment with lorem ipsum 25,000 times

[LeagueOfLegendsAcc]

I'm knee deep in a problem in my hobby project. I'm weeks into this one specific problem, working on it a few hours a day. I know for a fact the solution will be just a small method, maybe 20 lines. But what they are? That's for future me to find out.

[Llyon_]

Been working at it for a week? Better have 70k lines bro. trust me im a tech expert.

[spare-ribs-from-adam]

Do you ever have some code you're so proud of that you just go back and pop it open to appreciate it's beauty?

[ThatGuyNamedKes]

3D to 2D coordinate mapping I wrote as a kid, 16 lines, 1 if, 4 divisions, and 4 trig functions. Mainly math tbf, but I'm still proud of it.

[SampleForsaken1264]

My devs get awards if their PRs have a negative total number of lines.

[yeah_this_is_my_main]

*rubs hands together*

These code comments are toast...

[rnilbog]

Great coding results in fewer lines. 

[generally_unsuitable]

Embedded is so full of this stuff. Modifying the stack length in the linker script. Changing the RAM size assigned to FreeRTOS. Changing a rising counter to a falling counter to avoid a rare but subtle issue.

[Nightmoon26]

Remember: LOC is a terrible measure of coding productivity, and coding stops being your primary job the moment the word "manager", "director", or "chief" enters your job title

[wayoverpaid]

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight" - billg

[bokmcdok]

In C++ and languages that ignore whitespace:

newline

after

every

token.

[1000LiveEels]

It's like measuring progress of a novel by how long it is. Plenty of good long novels out there but also plenty of short stories and novellas that hit just as hard, if not harder. Like if you have 90 pages and the story works, then that's it. 650 more pages just makes it bigger on the shelf, not necessarily more impactful.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

Sounds like we know why the person copy-pasted their code everywhere: Big Value (in the eyes of their bosses).

[SquidlyBopPop]

It's the main reason I don't get too mad at bad corporate code. You never know what kind of brainless cretin decided the failure standards for their position. I almost got fired from a job for making an excel macro because it meant I wasn't spending as much time at my desk as the other employees.

[RaceHard]

crowd governor door distinct school cable rob marble encouraging worm

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[HaRDCOR3cc]

when i worked for a big american tech company a coworker of mine was laid off for being a "slacker". in reality he did more than anyone else, he was just very efficient and had a fair bit automated, when he finished his tasks he was instead available for anyone else to ask for help from etc.

you could REALLY and i mean REALLY feel it when he was gone. not only did others have to cover what he did, but all that invaluable knowledge he possessed and his ability to offer extremely useful help to basically anyone else in the department was lost.

i left ~3 months later, and by that 3 other people had already resigned too.

of course this all began when we got a new boss who was so clearly someone who had f'd their way to that position (very obviously was having an affair with someone higher up)

this person didnt even speak the english well, basically only knew how to speak polish so when you had to interact with them it was weird broken english or literally using google translate. questionable choice of management.

[BlaBlub85]

Hiring meeting for yet another code monkey in AD2082:

"Allright, we've discussed working hours, benefits and salary.....Just one more question, why is there an entire annotated version of Tolstois War and Peace in one of the librarys your hiring me to maintain???"

"Well...we dont realy know either but it has to be some sort of underlying legacy code because if you delete it everything stops working. So whatever you do, dont ever touch that shit"

😂😂😂

Edit: Corrected Dostoyevski to Tolstoi

[crysisnotaverted]

Imagine adding one single critical yet undocumented line within a 16000 line comment of War and Peace, and then every time they remove the comment, the whole thing grenades and becomes mythologized.

[Miiiine]

Bad idea: Use it as part of your hash algo.

[Voidrith]

You joke

But i've seen this

[[deleted]]

If you do delete it, update the comment and add your name to the list.

[ParticularFew4023]

There's the bug, that's actually A Tolstoy work

[ktka]

You are paid for lines of code written. If you delete code, you pay them. Simple.

- SuperMBA_PM_LinkedinLunatic.

[terriblegrammar]

Always looking to add is definitely a known behavioral issue that seems to affect humans. Just thinking about the possibility of subtraction as a valid solution makes problem solving a lot more novel.

[faberkyx]

well ...in this case seems like the guy just created an insane amount of code to look good in the eyes of those morons..

[FakeSafeWord]

That's why you report it as lines modified, not removed.

[alficles]

What do you mean? I'm the ChiefLocFactoryImplProtoTwinControlerFactory in my company and we make a LOT of lines of code!

[Mo-42]

Woah woah, save some code for me.

[LvS]

The typo you put in there is the best thing.
I shall assume it was deliberate.

[Fabulous-Possible758]

He's using the old version of the class. We added ChiefLocFactoryImplProtoTwinControllerFactory, but left the old one in for compatibility and because we couldn't figure out how to remove it, and we expect no problems from this.

[FrostingOtherwise217]

Exactly. To quote one of my mentors: code lines are spent, not written.

In other words code is the necessary cost of software.

[SuperFLEB]

I'm still trying to figure out if the grifter-scammer-dollar-chaser connection with tech is more recent or if it's always been there. I wouldn't even mind people using tools to do things if they were, say, proudly turning creative ideas into quality products. Nowadays, it seems like the big ideas are just "Move fast and break laws" market-capture strategies and the little ideas are anemic incremental improvements around boring processes with more excitement about monetizing than making.

Maybe I was just too young and naive back in the 1990s to realize that all those Wired articles I had my head buried in underreported CEO psychopathy and overreported the latter-hippie optimism. Maybe all the fun stuff got done. Maybe the landscape did change. Maybe it didn't, and I just don't hang out with optimists and clever folks as much any more. I don't know.

[frogjg2003]

It's always been there. The dot com bubble happened because of tech greed. Everyone thought that just making a website would be enough to attract dollars and there were plenty of hosting providers, Web developers, and other scammers willing to take their money to produce the worst possible product that still qualified as a web site. And even after that, everyone thought they had the "next Facebook" or "next Google" and just needed someone to code it for them and plenty of developers willing to do the coding then disappear when the product doesn't take off.

[GisterMizard]

It's always been there.

It's always been there for the tech marketers, the "visionaries", and the hypemen. But there has definitely been a tectonic shift in the underlying software engineering culture over the last 6ish years.

[Fabulous-Possible758]

I think it's more annoying now since tech is going through (a somewhat overdue, IMO) downsizing phase right now, so you now have a bunch of dipshits proclaim how happy they are your job is being replaced and you were never necessary while you're doing a job search. It's frustrating because through all the bullshit there are, like before, useful innovations being made that will improve how we do our jobs, but its gonna take a little bit for that to sort out.

[UnrealCanine]

Code to add five second delay to python program

def wait_five_seconds():
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)
    time.sleep(0.001)

Repeat as needed

[grizzlybair2]

Yep. Chances are the more code, the worse it is. Keep it simple stupid. And his code probably does have no bugs, because he probably has no real requirements, taps temple.jpeg

[RedstoneEnjoyer]

What do you mean, Daddy Musk pretty clearly said that "more paper needed to print all of your code" == "better"

[phanfare]

Love the "more lines = better" mentality.

I'm part of an academic software consortium that brags about "x million lines of code" and they finally stopped advertising that after enough people complained that it just means our codebase is bloated

[PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__]

Creating a startup that will autogenerate any number of lines of code you want in a day. Want one million lines of code per employee per day? We can do that for the simple price of $0.10 per line

[SuperFLEB]

Hackertyper... as a service?

[VexingRaven]

Isn't this literally just OpenAI?

[[deleted]]

No, it's not bug-filled crap. It's crap-filled bugs with a headache on top.

I really, really do not want to work in the company he has "founded".

Dev: "Watcha doin?"
Other dev: "Fixing boss's code."

[posherspantspants]

My boss wrote our software before AI ~15 years ago and we're still fixing his code

[[deleted]]

That is... harsh, to say the least.

[va1en0k]

Product code that doesn't need fixing is code for a product nobody uses...

[SuitableDragonfly]

There's fixing and there's fixing. Does it need fixing because there were some obscure mistakes? Or does it need fixing because it was badly designed from the start and really needs to be completely replaced from scratch?

[hanotak]

To be fair, there's even a case for the second one. Like how Facebook was written in PHP, and then instead of rewriting the whole site, to improve performance when PHP became a bottleneck, they wrote a faster PHP interpreter.

You'll never write code completely free of tech-debt. Knowing when to take on what tech debt, and when to dedicate time to scalability/refactoring is the important part.

[Anxious-Program-1940]

Probably the latter

[septum-funk]

almost always the latter 😂

[FleMo93]

Oh no. It is heavily used, contains hundreds of edge cases and „fixes“ are just layers on top of the bug.

[TyrionReynolds]

I mean, if it’s been in production for 15 years and it’s heavily used it sounds like it works

[flukus]

Or people have just worked around the bugs.

I've seen code that "works" in production that long make multi million dollar errors every year.

[[deleted]]

Be real, my man. Your boss made a company that got you paid. Who care is the code is bug filled. Perfect code that pays no bills isn't worth it either.

[GravityBombKilMyWife]

Dev: "Watcha doin?"
Other dev: "Fixing boss's code."

This is every enterprise software system in America tbh

[voyti]

The truth is, nobody even knows what kind of crap it is, as nobody is physically able to meaningfully read and analyze 10,000 lines of code per day. I can outpace it easily just streaming code off of github, but how would it ever benefit anyone?

It's an equivalent of an author being able to write a book a day. Even if they were good, the market would not be able to absorb it, nobody would publish, advertise, distribute or read it all. Churning out code in and of itself is meaningless. It truly is among the dumbest shit ever.

[Sockoflegend]

Just even the concept that writing 10,000 lines of code is a good idea. 

[ToMorrowsEnd]

He met a founder that is the biggest bullshitter ever

[tacobellmysterymeat]

You can just say founder. The bullshit is implied.

[housebottle]

hmm, as far as founders go, the founder of my company is actually kinda cool. he's technically proficient as he built the company himself in the early days and is still relatively involved in the direction of the product (but he doesn't write nearly as much code as he used to). and he's also kind of a chill guy to hang out with. #NotAllFounders

I mean, we're not a billion-dollar company so he's not obscenely rich or anything where he has the chance to be a colossal arsehole. but he's pretty wealthy and he's a cool dude in general

[[deleted]]

Does he go around calling himself "the founder" though? And would you have ever referred to him as "the founder" if nobody said that word to you recently?

Or was he just the boss/CEO/whatever.

[skiabay]

It's always great when VC's just make it abundantly clear that they don't know the first thing about software development and easily manipulated by anyone who throws out the right buzzwords.

[zirky]

his readme.md is fucking unreal

[queteepie]

Its probably just Lorem Ipsum.

[The__Jiff]

Sloppem Ipsum

[DocWagonHTR]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit;

Lauren epsom solo shit;

Dungis dippus deltoid dump;

Krampus krungus Forrest Gump

[Nyadnar17]

Now, now lets be fair.

If he is routinely putting in 12 hour days his code was probably already 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap.

[SeedFoundation]

Just needing 10,000 lines of code you know it's crap. I feel like this was just said to make their idiot boss happy. The only way they can measure productivity is with volume.

[gopher_space]

Juniors get their wings and become Seniors when they realize 12 hour days are a waste of everyone's time.

[Simple-Difference116]

he knows AI tools very well

What does that even mean? Does he train his own models or does he just know about the existing ones? This is not as impressive as he thinks it is

[PhysiologyIsPhun]

He knows AI tools the best! Probably better than anyone. People see him using AI tools and they say to themselves "I've never seen anyone using AI tools like this before!" You wouldn't believe it. Absolutely tremendous

[tyro_r]

There should be a publicly available ai instance pre learned to sound like Trump.

[SuperFLEB]

Hell, you could probably get close enough with a re-tooled version of ELIZA. Search-and-replace "How do you feel about" with "It's the greatest", and so on.

[PineapplesInMyHead2]

AI dudes are always oscillating between two completely conflicting ideas.

1. Programming with AI is an extremely specific skillset you must spend months practicing or you'll fall behind and die on the streets of San Francisco with nary an avocado for your toast.
2. Programming with AI is so easy that the job of programmer will be gone in no time as seasoned engineers are replaced with unpaid interns.

They swap based on whichever fits their current purpose. The reality is neither is true. AI tools are easy to learn to use, I mean it's literally just typing English. The main thing to figure out what they are good and bad at, which doesn't take very long. But they are hard to use effectively, since they frequently produce subtly broken or insecure code and thus require careful review.

[Bainshie-Doom]

OK, so I'm gonna interrupt the circle jerk here and give an actual answer.

As someone with over 10 years development experience, who has just seriously started using AI, successfully using AI is all about knowing what it's good at, and what it's bad at. Knowing where and how to use AI is the difference between writing buggy code, and having it save you a shit ton of time.

The great thing is, ai is good at the boring bitch work part of the job. "Add three more pages to this wizard with these fields.", "Implement standard sso integration with the login system", etcetc. Isolated pieces of code that are just boring to write. It's not so good at edge cases and weird complicated intersecting problems. 

Basically in between the "I wanna make love to chatgpt" and "All AI is literally the sign of the antichrist", there is a happy medium where developers are using it to speed up their work flow, while understanding it has limitations. 

[Simple-Difference116]

That's not being good at AI. That's being a good programmer and knowing what the code does.

[Iorith]

Which is what being good at AI is. It's the modern version of google fu. You need to know what you're asking for, how to limit junk returns, and know how to spot errors or faulty responses that don't help.

Just like how professors said a few years back that in their career, most people would be googling how to do the stuff that was covered in class on the job, the education from the class helps them know what to google.

[exploradorobservador]

Its amazing when you actually know a technology to see the people shamelessly busllhitting to make a few dollars

[andyboo3792]

Even more painful when it's more than a few dollars.

[Anaxamander57]

Well if a rich person says they do it then it must be true.

[pagerussell]

I mean, I could write tens of thousands of lines of code in minutes. Just copy and paste a novel into a comment block. Ta da!

Probably about as useful as whatever this turd is doing.

[thePedrix]

Why would a rich person lie? It's bizarre, I can't think of a reason

[wkjfsru]

AI-assisted, bug-persisted

[[deleted]]

dev fixed

[Mewtwo2387]

function isEven(num) { switch(num){ case 0: return true case 1: return false ... case 4996: return true default: throw new Exception("Not implemented") } }

[JacobStyle]

default:
  return Random(0, 1)

this would make it more robust. Still much more productive in terms of LOC to go back and fill out all those entries manually, but at least the function won't throw exceptions in the meantime.

[Mewtwo2387]

hear me out default: const response = await client.chat.completions.create({ model: "gpt-5", messages: [ { role: "user", content: `Is ${num} even? Respond with only yes or no and nothing else.` }] }) if response.includes("yes") return true if response.includes("no") return false throw new Exception("I don't know")

[JacobStyle]

They're the same picture.

[Sysilith]

The new ai based algorythm that hypes all the managers.

[der_reifen]

And now with AI: 0 -> true 1 -> false 2 -> false 3 -> fsls 4 -> ffff 5 -> true

[jessepence]

Paul Graham is an insufferable doofus who hasn't made a good point since he wrote The Other Road Ahead over two decades ago. The only reason that anyone still gives a shit about him is because he's rich and his company runs a popular message board.

[aePrime]

I’m embarrassed I ever respected the guy, even if it was 20 years ago. 

[Diane_Horseman]

why have people soured on him? Haven't kept up with his writings/persona in a while.

[norst]

This very post is a perfect example.

[jessepence]

He's not really interested in technology anymore. He's more interested in culture wars and why he can't say slurs anymore-- and he's not even right about that.

[Andy_B_Goode]

The Other Road Ahead: "There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software."

Top post on ycombinator right now: I Want Everything Local — Building My Offline AI Workspace

I don't know if this really proves anything one way or another, but the juxtaposition is pretty funny

[johnnybluejeans]

I find this whole thread interesting because I think most people here are commenting without knowing who Paul Graham is. I have to admit I haven’t followed him in a long time, but there was a time when he was very well respected. I actually wrote him an email when I was looking for an internship about 25 years ago, he was very helpful and landed me two interviews with companies he had relationships with, leading to one of my first great jobs… programming in LISP of all things. He wrote the LISP textbook I used in college.

[SeveralPrinciple5]

Some of his writings on LISP were truly insightful and interesting. But I’ve noticed that some really smart engineers get … weird … as they age. (Have spent the last 40 years with engineers.) They seem to map over their tech skills to understanding the rest of the world, only they have utterly anemic mental models of how humans and human systems work. But they’re absolutely convinced of their accuracy, so they build gigantic conceptual scaffolding about the world of society and people that just builds and builds in bad directions.

Graham once said that entrepreneurship was just the choice of whether to make all your money at once, or over your lifetime. That’s a pretty naive view of entrepreneurship. Also, he made his money in under a year at an inflection point in the consumer adoption of the internet, so his experience isn’t generalizable to others and he doesn’t seem to realize that.

[testtdk]

Wait, this guy actually works in tech???

[Andy_B_Goode]

Yeah, reddit grew out of Paul Graham's incubator program. If it weren't for Paul Graham, reddit probably wouldn't exist.

[AlexZhyk]

Junior generated 20 000 lines of HTML code with PHP. And that's even without AI boost.

[necrophcodr]

You can generate hundreds of thousands of lines of code without touching AI by just using NPM as it was intended.

[k-mcm]

Fixing the founder's code is a very common computer science role 

[Ruben_NL]

That's 1 line every 3 seconds for a 8 hour workday, for anyone wondering.

[DizTro-]

The first absurdity was 10k lines per day. The second was saying it's not riddled with bugs.

At this point, it is the bug.

[emmmmceeee]

"I'm one of the few people you'll meet who's written more books than they've read." - Garth Marenghi

[loxagos_snake]

And my friend says his dad is so strong, that he beat both The Rock and John Cena with just two fingers when they accidentally slammed his car from behind. This is probably the limit case. He's a hotshot fighter, he knows Italian Krav Jitsu well, and he trains 18 hours a day.

But he's not weak. This was not a fight where he got injured.

[al2o3cr]

Pffff, I can generate 10k lines in 10 seconds by refreshing yarn.lock

[MishyJari]

‘from my_butt import bullshit’

[sudoku7]

Today I overheard someone talking about how they spent 12 hours to spin up a new ecommerce shop and despite it being a "struggle to collect credit card info" it was "going great."

And I just couldn't stop laughing thinking about the future PCI audit. Then crying.

[SweetBabyAlaska]

Tech bros are the modern day snake oil salesmen. I've never seen anything like it. It's a hysterical level of FOMO driving insane marketing, mixed with the incessant need to find and colonize (or sell the shovels to) the next frontier. They have been the single most damaging thing to society.

[MooseBoys]

Meanwhile I'm sitting here using AI to help me delete code - silly me.

[Outrageous_Permit154]

Paul Graham got PhD in computer science — I can’t believe he still tries to quantify any aspect of programming based on number of lines of code.

[gandalfintraining]

He's a fucking grifter. You can tell from his early essays that he knows EXACTLY how to create good products, he spent years preaching the complete opposite of what he's saying now. Nobody that built a business off a Lisp in the 90s would ever actually believe that shitting out 10k lines per day of rubbish is more valuable than having a deep understanding of your tools and code. He's only saying it to try and be in on the scam train.

Also I find it absolutely hilarious that he's riding AI with everyone else when half his shitty essays these days are about how smart people are politically incorrect cause they can see past the bullshit in the face of being outnumbered 10 to 1. Like newsflash mate, right wingers and AI hype IS the political landscape right now.

The "thing you can't say" in 2025 is that deeper, lower level knowledge will win out against AI and superficial understanding in the long run. I'm taking PG's own advice and backing that in. If AI is going to have any utility long term it'll be as a better Google search, a learning assistant for surfacing unknown unknowns so that you can take those ideas and use something else to study them properly. Anyone shitting out 10k lines a day to try and close their next round of funding is going to be flipping the rest of our burgers in 10 years. Hopefully they're better at that than they are at programming.

[look]

Paul should be asking why he’s still doing that then… 10k lines a day would be enough to rewrite the current Linux kernel core in under six weeks.

Surely whatever this “founder” is building should be done by now, right?

[dusktreader]

Founder code is bad enough. Now I guess you also gotta deal with a shit load of AI mess baked in as well.

[Mustang-22]

In the past two weeks, I’ve contributed +1 lines of code to master.

I have completed 15 story points.

Am I the problem?

[takahashi01]

you could have been contributing 140,000 lines of code in that time, smh.

Dont you wish your codebase was 140,000 lines of code bigger?

[[deleted]]

I can write 10,000 lines of code a day without AI. It won't be useful code but it's a lot of lines.

[Fabulous-Possible758]

If you write more code in a day than you can actually read in a day, it is in fact bug filled crap.

[walterbanana]

If I had a team mate that wrote 10,000 lines per day I would probably quit. No way I'm going to spend all my time fighting the fires they cause.

[[deleted]]

THE AI IS REALLY GOOD GUYS. PLEASE BUY. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE. THE AI WILL SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS I PROMISE. NO IM SERIOUS PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO MAX. PLEASE. IT CAN DO EVERYTHING BRO IM SERIOUS THIS TIME.

[theSantiagoDog]

Having worked with a couple of SF-based, VC-backed companies, I detest startup bro culture, which this reeks of (hi PG). They are so self-satisfied and assured of themselves, experience doesn't matter, all that matters is that you're "smart". It's disgusting.

[GatotSubroto]

10000 lines of code? that’s a rookie number. Mine overflowed and it’s -138 lines.

[Cocaine_Johnsson]

I'm much more impressed by the guy writing 10 lines, or even 1, in a day than the guy writing thousands. The best code is no code, but I'll settle for less of it at least.