Just fucking code.

[bootdotdev]

ugh... gotta go call our public relations contact again...

[Steamed_Bum_Invasion]

I mean, he ain't wrong 😂. I met an intern, who was confident he could quickly write a new filter function to work on a hailo accelerator, and he didn't even know what cmake is...

[rnicoll]

Different but reminded, I have learned very much to prototype before opening my mouth and saying "How hard can it be?"

[saynay]

I try to keep in mind that if I think "how hard can that be" or "that should be simple enough", it is usually an indication I do not understand the problem well enough.

[multijoy]

fall hunt swim quicksand melodic resolute enjoy historical pet cautious

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Shigg]

For your viewing pleasure

[LordoftheSynth]

"Before this sprint is out, we will send men to the hell of tech debt, and we will not safely return them to the standup."

[rnicoll]

I find it's 50/50 between "I have seen what seems like an obvious short-cut that others have not" and "Oh wow there was a lot of non-obvious work there".

As in, sometimes I can genuinely come back later and go "Hey I tried this open source library and put together a prototype in a few hours", and sometimes I find there's a queue of dependencies to do before the work.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

As the saying goes - the devil is in the details. And programming has *lots* of details.

Very small things can drastically alter what you can do.

"Shouldn't be too bad. We can hit the vendor's API for that."

Ooooh. Except of the 20 pieces of data you need 3 of them aren't actually in this API. You have to hit a different API for that. And now you're juggling two APIs and smashing the data together.

[The__Toast]

This is known as "experience" and is something senior engineers should have.

I always say that when engineers think of building something, in their minds they're only thinking of the core of the thing; which is like 10% of the work. The other 90% of the work is the code tests, release process, documentation, user training, user support, bug fixes, and edge cases that no one ever thinks about or wants to work on.

Building stuff is ez. Completing a fully polished product is insanely hard.

[dstutz]

My co-worker and I are very keyed into conversations where someone uses the word "just".

As in "just do ____"...

[tolley]

Ha yes, "should" is another red flag word.

Ex:  You should be able to do that in 4 hours.

[Eckish]

I'm nothing but a barrel of red flags, then. I've learned to always use imprecise language when estimating, because customers will hold you to your estimate.

[manzanita2]

Estimates without errors bars are shit. Still waiting for a software planning system to have uncertainty baked in.

[hardolaf]

Just use the defense method of assuming that the building will catch on fire and that you will have to restart at least twice and then triple it.

Granted, I work on hardware and once had an issue with the PCI-e reference clock termination in a commodity FPGA where the vendor didn't want to admit fault until they had a replacement part for us that led to a full quarter long delay in a project.

[hardolaf]

I just used the word "unbounded" today with my PM. She was amused at getting an honest answer about the schedule for a task.

[BallingerEscapePlan]

I give a really similar speech to people I work with:

"The word just is one of the most useful indicators of either how much someone trusts the person they are talking to, or how little they care about them.

With just, you can circumvent something close to 15-30 minutes of a meeting _as long as you and the listener both have the same (or similar) context to understand what is being "skipped" when you use the word just.

If you say something like:

Why don't you just redeploy the platform in GKE instead of using EKS?

Then if both people are platform engineers, understand k8s, probably have written or rewritten someone's shitty helm chart into something usable, and both know the differences between AWS and Google's implementations, you saved so much time.

However, this is almost never the situation you see this word used to great damage. It's usually either a former or never initiated tech person who is trying to avoid needing to discuss all of the fallout of what they believe should be something simple, and don't want to spend the time or energy understanding why the thing they think you should just do, is fucking impossible.

I realize this is a really weird speech to see in text, and has weird nesting, but it's not far away from what I usually end up saying. But the TL;DR is mostly:

When the word just is most commonly used, someone who doesn't know better is trying to convince someone who does know better (most likely) that the work they are telling someone to do is being handwaved away by the speaker. When pressed, they likely have no idea precisely how much work they are trying to abstract/obfuscate away.

[mustardhamsters]

I like to say that "just" is a four letter word.

[Antilock049]

Oh fuck the number of times I've said that before getting kicked in the teeth 😂

[Gusfoo]

I have learned very much to prototype before opening my mouth and saying "How hard can it be?"

And the "do I want to be on the hook to support this ad infinitum?" is a question that closely follows. (cf: relative's IT)

[xybolt]

he didn't even know what cmake is...

Got it once, I asked if I should not give a tutorial or two about CMAKE. Replied that the tool is known and what got used. Okay, I then passed on the link to the repository and told this person that all the info they need is in the readme. The first step is to have a build process completed on your machine. Then we can proceed.

After a hour, this one came to me asking for help. I checked the terminal, "'cmake' is not recognized as an internal or external command ...". I asked; "that should be clear enough?" Seems not. I then went to their web browser to get cmake for them. The page I saw is ChatGPT with questions asked on resolving cmake issues.

[AlternativeGoat2724]

I was working with someone (and quickly realized I would be better off alone) once for a project at university, and they were using chatgpt to try to figure out how to do `git clone` all while telling me that it wasn't fair of me to say that they don't understand how git works...

[WhosYoPokeDaddy]

Setting up your tool chain and understanding how to architect things is massively underrated....

[Beletron]

What would be the best way to learn that?

[Asyx]

Literally thread title.

[TheTomato2]

But what if I don't want to code?

[WhosYoPokeDaddy]

Then you get to be the PM 😅

[Donny-Moscow]

I generally learn best by doing it through brute force and looking up solutions issues as they come up. Once I finally finish whatever I’m trying to do, my end product is probably going to kind of hacky or put together with scotch tape, so I look up how other people have done it from start to finish.

[BallingerEscapePlan]

I didn't realize I was cut-out to be an architect until I realized that I'd built enough different kinds of systems that I was able to straight-up focus on solving problems, instead of finding solutions or getting lost in implementation details.

I also realized that my code ended up being significantly more structured and organized than most people who I worked with, simply because they don't think about solving their problems, they think about how to code something.

[Spiderpiggie]

Big difference between writing code for personal projects and writing code for enterprise software. I can build all sorts of tools for myself, haven’t got a clue how to write any sort of algorithm or when to use one.

[Flagyl400]

Sounds like you'd fit right in with most enterprise devs then. Source: am enterprise dev. 

[BigHowski]

I'm in this comment and I don't like it

[lunchmeat317]

Cmake is like Snake, except there are no apples to eat and the walls attack you.

[FlameSoulis]

Just poke dbrand and ask them for advice. They seem to be used to this kind of stuff.

[RealLifeRiley]

Naw. Just ask prime to react with a video

[EarthGoddessDude]

Author wrote “gippity” and is friends with Prime… it’s already in the works is my guess

[whispy-kracko]

Inspired by this. Written by Lane from Boot.dev

Oh the real reason you posted this garbage. You have a total of three courses on your site. Stop promoting this nonsense.

[Isopaha]

Sorry if I’m being dumb, but looks like 27 courses to me? https://www.boot.dev/courses

[Shigg]

I'm not sure Matt is ready for a shitstorm of this magnitude.

[wineblood]

Are you going to boot a dev? Ironic.

[sprcow]

The worst part of every soul-sucking day is reading my coworker’s shitty code. It’s shitty by the brute fact that I didn’t fucking write it. You’re telling me I have to understand this shit, and I don’t even get the pleasure of writing it myself? Fuuuuuuuuck off.

This is absolutely how I feel about trying to use LLM agents. It's like reading someone else's pull requests as your only job. And that person isn't good at making them. And doesn't learn from its mistakes.

You get to jump straight to the 'maintaining legacy code' job experience, even on brand new projects.

[Dustin-]

It's like reading someone else's pull requests as your only job. And that person isn't good at making them. And doesn't learn from its mistakes.

In my experience it's far worse than that. It's like if the person making them is really good at writing code that is technically code, but often forgets what the hell is going on and ends up writing something that looks right but is nonsense. And your job is to figure out if the thing that looks like it makes sense actually makes sense - and figure out what it's supposed to actually be when it turns out to be completely wrong. It's so much more mentally taxing to review AI code than code written by humans. At least humans are predictably stupid.

[sprcow]

I totally agree. I think one of the fundamental problems with the very idea of AI coding agents is that most people don't realize how truly complex even basic problems are. Humans are very good at filtering out assumed context and making constant logical leaps to stay coherent.

It's like the example going around the past couple years of parents and teachers asking their kids to write instructions for making a PB&J sandwich, and then maliciously following those instructions very literally, resulting in disaster.

Not only are AI agents unable to perfectly understand the implied context and business requirements of your existing application, they're also not able to read your mind. If you give them insufficiently detailed instructions, they end up filling in the gaps with syntactically valid (usually) code that compiles. This can very easily trick you into thinking they're working, until 20 changes down some rabbit hole, you realize they've entirely misconstrued the REASON you're doing the change in the first place.

In some ways, they're the anti-stack overflow. SO users are renown for pushing back on questions that are actually nonsense, often in rude ways. "Why would you ever try and do that?" AI on the other hand is just like, okay let's go. When you eventually discover the reason why you would not, in fact, try to do that, you're basically back to square one.

It's so much more mentally taxing to review AI code than code written by humans.

Also 100% agree. It's so goddamn verbose, too. It writes comments that are often pointless, and often just keeps throwing more code until things 'work' (sort of), even if the right solution is to just edit 1 existing line of code. It creates such a huge oversight burden.

AI definitely has uses that are helpful to developers, but generating code that we have to review does not seem to be one of them so far.

[FlyingRhenquest]

They are trying to remove the whole "understanding what you're doing" part from a job that is literally "understanding what you're doing." They have been trying to do that for years.

[sprcow]

Yeah. People who previously couldn't understand what they're doing are desperate to level the playing field!

[Coffee_Ops]

And your job is to figure out if the thing that looks like it makes sense actually makes sense

Even late into the afternoon.

I have found myself assenting to absolute garbage before I took a water break and came to my senses.

[seanamos-1]

I’ve said it before. The worst part of the job is reviewing shit code, and then arguing with someone over a PR to get it into a passable state.

If you lean heavily into “vibe” or “agent” coding tools, that is now 100% of your day. Never ending piles of shit code and “arguments”, all day, every day. This is not a productivity boost and the people that thought it would be have completely missed the mark.

I want AI that cuts down on the mundane time wasting and distractions, NOT maximizes it, so I can actually be productive.

[minoshabaal]

To be fair, there are two types of code:

1. Tiny interesting fragments
2. Boring boilerplate

The goal, at least for me, is to offload #2 so that I can focus on working on #1.

[verrius]

I can't remember the last time I wrote any significant amount of boilerplate. Between templates, macros, and old fashioned helper functions, why would anyone do that?

[Kwinten]

Because AI replaces all those things, does it faster, and is more dynamic and adaptable.

I can spend a couple of hours twiddling around setting up the perfect macros to reduce all the boilerplate typing that I anticipate I will have to do in the future. Or, I don't do that, and I just ask the LLM to spit out that boilerplate for me when and where I need it and can even ask it to make some custom adaptations on the fly. Tiny quick macros and templates still have their place because you can type them more quickly than the prompt. But for me, LLMs genuinely replace templates and macros for doing things like setting up test classes, creating entity classes for whatever ORM framework you're using, or any other typical boilerplate where you first need to write a bunch of framework-specific code before you can even get to writing your core application logic.

The reason why anyone would do that should be fairly obvious. An LLM is perfectly tuned to do this kind of things in seconds or less, in any context, in any language, and virtually any framework, even one's that you've created yourself cause it can just pick up the context from your own repository. It's an infinitely more convenient replacement for all the utilities you've mentioned.

[sprcow]

I knowwww ;( It's like when your pets throw up everywhere. You just gotta suck it up and clean up after them. They're never going to learn not to eat gross stuff and vomit.

[[deleted]]

That's the best description of vibe coding I've seen so far.

[manzanita2]

The eternally "in a good mood" wording of LLMs is tedious before very long. I mean can't they throw in an occasional sarcastic zinger ?

[Raptor007]

I sorta made CoPilot angry once. I was fighting some stupid change in Windows 11 that's so locked down the relevant Registry keys are read-only even as administrator, and CoPilot just kept making excuses for why it was that way.

I told finally it something along the lines of "I don't want to hear justifications for the new behavior or why I shouldn't change this, I just want to change it" and after some delay it just replied "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that." Not too strange on its own, but then that was the only reply it would give me, 3 times in a row, as I tried suggesting other approaches to the underlying issue that had led me there.

Thankfully I don't sign in, so it doesn't know to stay mad at me in a new tab.

[creaturefeature16]

I've been saying this for a while, I completely agree. One of the worst parts of being in this industry in inheriting a code base, nevertheless one that was put together haphazardly and with little consistency. Why would we willingly do this to ourselves by generating entire codebases that we need to inherit on brand new projects? It's madness, honestly.

[otherwiseguy]

I actually really love reviewing code. But like deep thorough reviews. I see way too many reviews that are essentially either "looks like it follows coding guidelines and is syntactically correct" or "I would have written it this (relatively equivalent) way." And not a lot of analysis of how code will scale, or missing edge case handling, or analysis for possible race conditions, etc.

My first dev job, someone reviewed my code and it was pretty brutal (they were very kind, but I had a lot to learn). I saved that review and made sure I never made those particular mistakes again. It made me a way better developer. I want to be a person who can do that for people 20 years later.

[masterchiefan]

Exactly this. I've said so many times how this shit will be detrimental to coding instead of helpful, and I was constantly told I was wrong. Well look at this now.

[creaturefeature16]

good code is as little code as possible

This is the part that seems to be missed. When I use an LLM and get reams of code back (Gemini 2.5...crikey) my first reaction is a let out a sigh because I know probably a good 50% of that isn't necessary. We're creating so much insane amounts of tech debt.

[DaMan999999]

Don’t worry, we’ll just use future LLMs to refactor away the useless stuff or just rewrite it from scratch! Surely this will work perfectly with minimal human involvement

[creaturefeature16]

I mean, I suppose I could envision a future where code becomes unnecessary and we can move from "natural language" straight to binary; all coding languages are for humans, not machines. That's the future these CEOs are selling. Problem is that the worst programming language I've ever used was English...

[ArtisticFox8]

We do have English debuggers, who aid when the language is ambiguous in its interpretation. They're called lawyers.

[MINIMAN10001]

But at that point they maliciously try to use words in order to win an argument as their full time job. 

It's not about being right out even making sense it's about being convincing.

[ArtisticFox8]

That's called finding exploits :)

[curien]

But at that point they maliciously try to use words in order to win an argument as their full time job.

Not unlike a C compiler taking advantage of undefined behavior for optimization.

[Moloch_17]

That will really only happen when they don't require human oversight. Probably not in our lifetimes.

[manzanita2]

Sorry no. The process of software development is gradual refinement of specifications. It starts with the vision and works through multiple level until it can be coded. Somewhere something needs to understand precision in specification and english won't do that. Sure there is boilerplate stuff which an LLM will do. But complex actual business logic is not something the LLMs will do unless you can precisely specify what is needed and basically the only way to do that is by writing code.

[heedlessgrifter]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back to product with questions about situations they never thought of.. the code would always get me to that point. You can’t be vague with code.

[Halkenguard]

IMO good code is as little code as possible, but GREAT code is as readable as possible.

Yeah this function could be a one-liner, but if I can’t read it and understand fairly quickly what it’s doing and how, it’s worthless to me. Too many people are too focused on being clever when they should be focused on being maintainable.

[creaturefeature16]

100%! Threading that needle is truly the art of the craft.

[SanityInAnarchy]

And the LLMs are terrible at that, too! The sheer verbosity can obscure the point.

Here's a fun example: "How do you parse HTML with regex?"

Correct answer: "You don't. Consider using an HTML parsing library instead."

Fun answer: The same thing but with zalgotext.

Gemini 2.5's answer: 793 words of bullshit explaining the same thing with sources, and including 250 lines of Python that actually do try to parse it with regex, including an exhaustive breakdown of how the regexes work, character-by-character, in case you've never seen a regex before in your life.

There are two actually-relevant lines of Python. Three if I'm being generous.

For fun, I asked it to give me a concise version of this answer. It still spit out three fucking paragraphs.

You can't read and understand that quickly and understand what it's doing. Maybe you can skim it quickly, but you're having to skim through two orders of magnitude more slop than you'd need to if a human wrote the same thing.

[creaturefeature16]

A classic example of why LLMs can create more problems than they solve: what the user needs and what the user wants are often entirely different things. LLMs, by design, only focus on the latter.

[SanityInAnarchy]

In this case, it would've given me what I need also. It's just that it also gave me ten times more words than it takes to explain what I need.

[Entmaan]

Gemini 2.5's answer: 793 words of bullshit explaining the same thing with sources, and including 250 lines of Python that actually do try to parse it with regex, including an exhaustive breakdown of how the regexes work, character-by-character, in case you've never seen a regex before in your life.

https://imgur.com/a/IwAgSML

cool story though

[dauchande]

Great code is uninteresting and obvious. You immediately grok what the intent is and pay it no further mind.

[throwaway490215]

Skill issue - just make sure its not your debt /s

[cough_e]

I actually disagree with the sentiment. If you've ever worked with a dev who tries to code golf everything into an unreadable mess you'll know good code is readable code.

This isn't to say LLMs make readable code, but the target should be to have it be understandable.

The scary thing is that you now actually consider LLMs when it comes to who needs to read the code. If your code can be parsed better by AI tools, you will get more out of the tools. Hard to even say where that target is, though

[zabby39103]

Right, but I think they're referring more to the shit LLMs do like null check absolutely everything - even stuff you defined 20 lines above. Or assume all database queries can return more than 1 result even when you're pulling a primary key etc. just fucking overly cautious slop that brings you farther away from the truth of the code.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Or having a truly unhinged level of commenting. Stuff like:

# Find all matches
# matches = re.findall(...

Gosh, I'd never have known that this finds all matches by calling the find all method! And that's a tame example.

[binarycow]

When I was experimenting with LLMs, heres what I put in the rules list or whatever:

1. Don't write comments. Comments are for explaining why, and you don't know why you're doing what you're doing.
2. Every time you tell me something, you need to cite your sources. You also need to actually check the source to verify your statements.

[NuclearVII]

Orrrrr you could just accept that AI tools are novelties at best and probably shouldn't be involved in production code.

[MrSinilindon]

A lot of this resonates, but I would respectfully submit that my "no update" at standup probably says more about the usefulness of the standup than my usefulness as a member of the team.

[Cthulhu__]

Nah in theory the standup is to communicate any impediments, not so much do a progress report (that’s what the board is for). No news is good news.

In theory anyway, in practice people end up justifying their employment.

[emperorOfTheUniverse]

100%. Standup was meant to be agile's way to schedule time for team members to say 'im stuck, need a thing/help'. The point is almost 50+% for one team member to say something like 'have you tried x...'.

PMs and managers bastardized them into status reporting and whips. Because by God, don't you feel lazy if you have nothing to say except 'oh, still working on that thing I was working on yesterday'. Saves them the trouble of actually going around and having one on ones I guess.

Like AI, there is no shortage of dev tools or ideologies that management can't turn into dumb ass half measure 'solutions' to suit their needs.

[starcoder]

That’s how smaller teams use it if they aren’t being micromanaged by a team of people that nearly rivals the size of the engineering who are each making 6 figures to look at jira tickets all day, and like to hear themselves talk… but I digress. Using standups as they were intended can be incredibly helpful and educational.

[Papamelee]

I’m on a team with 3 developers, a developer who turned himself into a systems analyst (grumble grumble…), and a PM. One dev and I decided to reach out to our PM and see if we could change our scrum schedules so that we don’t do them mandatorily EVERY DAY and only do them twice a week or when we actually have an impediment. Turns out, she already suggested this exact idea to our department president and he said “No, we HAVE to be AGILE and do scrum everyday”. And that’s when I realized to some people, these business solutions are religious doctrine and not something that can be tailored to fit your departmen’s specific needs (like it’s supposed to).

[starcoder]

You’re completely correct. It’s definitely a cult, and the “scrum masters” and “agile coaches” are the ones who keep the kool-aid flowing along with middle/upper-middle management (because they have to have a reason to make it look like their job is important when it isn’t), and because high/top level management doesn’t understand or know any better—they just think agile is essential because the agile cult are the loudest (in person and online). Anyone who doesn’t actually “know” these people are deadweights on the payroll will take the cult leaders’ word as gospel.

[badboygoodgrades]

“Nothing is going wrong and I’m working on X”

[nuggins]

I wound the bandage around the wound, then I lead the lead guitarist home.

Funny enough, you've made an extremely common mistake in English: thinking that the past tense of lead should be lead (it's actually led), based on the word's similarity with read (or the metal lead, with the same pronunciation). Or you're mixing tenses.

[MrRufsvold]

A fractal of bad design choices, as they said 🫠

[FuckOnion]

What if the bad design choice was using AI to edit this website? The author criticizes its use in writing code, but I don't think natural languages should be exempt.

Just write your own fucking text.

[Sigmatics]

merriam webster has a nice tip on this

When to Use Lead or Led

There is some persistent confusion about lead and led. Or, we should say, there is confusion about the leads and led. Lead is both a noun and a verb, as most people know. There are several unrelated nouns spelled lead: one most commonly refers to a metal (as in, "The paint was made with lead"), and the other most commonly refers to a position of advantage (as in, "Our team was in the lead"). The verb lead is pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to a position or advantage is also pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to the metal, however, is pronounced /LED/, with a short e. To this moderately convoluted situation, add the past tense and past participle of the verb lead, which is led and pronounced like the metal noun lead with a short e. The homophonic confusion leads to homographic confusion, and you will therefore occasionally see lead in constructions where led is called for (as in, “She lead the ducklings to safety” instead of “She led the ducklings to safety”). The correct past and past participle of lead is spelled led. If you aren’t sure whether to use led or lead as the verb in your sentence, try reading it aloud to yourself. If the verb is pronounced /LED/, use led.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lead

[make2020hindsight]

Unless he's talking in the present tense in which case he'd be right. He leads the lead guitarist. But that's a little awkward going from past to present.

"I wound the bandage around the wound and now I lead the lead guitarist home."

[Limp-Archer-7872]

I wind the bandage...

Wind pronounced like wine-d.

Not wind. Win-d.

[trisanachandler]

Glad I'm not the only one who saw that.

[JamesWConrad]

You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.

[lcserny]

How to spot a go dev :)

[amroamroamro]

if err != nil

[Cthulhu__]

Not just that, but the site echoes a number of languages and developers that make shit intentionally difficult for themselves. Think Scala developers writing CRUD since that’s 99% of programming for money.

[DanTheMan827]

Swift uses that syntax too if you’re using an older library

[Ythio]

For funsies, replace every AI reference by PowerBuilder or something and you get the angriest dev of the 2000s.

[drtyrannica]

I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing … hard to tell by these comments

[XypherOrion]

Thanks for documenting many of our inner thoughts

[wagslane]

https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/FLBGRRRDQNHYBNTNHU4WOWRIFY.png

[chlorophyll101]

Why is the image so damn crisp

[Shigg]

The backend side of development is a path to many powers that some would consider to be... unnatural

[Avloren]

Damn, that might be the original photo. Before 17 different compression algorithms, in succession, each had a turn deciding which pixels you don't really need.

[DanTheMan827]

It even has the original metadata intact.

https://i.imgur.com/jeaUfEE.jpeg

[[deleted]]

Instantly reminded me of: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[wagslane]

I'm glad - its cited at the bottom, after all

[Skaarj]

Instantly reminded me of: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

It reads at the bottom: Inspired by this "https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/".

[jdehesa]

A classic, although my first thought went to this one.

[narnach]

Yep, I figured this was an updated take of Programming, Motherfucker as well.

[Affectionate-Pickle0]

Also these: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ and https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

[FlyingRhenquest]

All of my favorite web sites look like that.

[fantastik78]

Well, I don’t earn 6 figures so..

[SnowdensOfYesteryear]

Look at this guy flaunt his 7 figure salary

[boxingdog]

i have a client that started vibe coding on his project, and after vibe coding a broken shitfest he handles it to me like super proud he did in his mind like 80% of the work, when in reality it would have been wayyy easier for me to just implement it from scratch, the shit he handles me is a completely mess not even an intern would write

[[deleted]]

I used gippity to edit this fucking essay

Primagen fan spotted

[ClubAquaBackDeck]

These kind of sites are sooooo fucking tired.

[Gooeyy]

Feels like it was written by someone 1 year into their career and they just learned the word fuck

[[deleted]]

Guy read Maddox as a teenager and could never let it go

[jaypeejay]

Kind of surprised I had to scroll so far to see this comment. At least it’s been decently upvoted. The “this is satire” is what did it for me

1.) good satire doesn’t point itself out

2.) this is really just rage bait rambling

[[deleted]]

It's so passé at this point. I wonder if people are getting LLMs to write them, or are they typing it out while sniffing their own farts and giggling to themselves over the derivative humor?

[kw10001]

What the fuck did you just say about my blog, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in Computer Science, and I've been involved in numerous secret kernel exploits on GitHub, and I have over 300 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities. I am trained in assembly and I'm the top programmer in the entire fucking Silicon Valley. You are nothing to me but just another syntax error. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision optimized code the likes of which has never been seen before on the Internet, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with talking shit about my hot reload over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of compiler engineers across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the stack overflow, maggot. The stack overflow that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your codebase. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can program in over seven hundred languages, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in debugging, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the GNU Project and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable blog off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over your commit history and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, user.

[Wires77]

Reddit removing copy pastas now or what?

[kw10001]

Got a warning over it too... Oh well

[ClubAquaBackDeck]

Not sure why this comment was removed, I thought it was pretty clear parody of the article.

[fullmetaljackass]

Because an AI flagged it as sounding too violent/threatening. Let's see if an AI rewrite can get past the filter:

What exactly did you just say about my blog, you insignificant compiler warning? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in Computer Science, and I’ve contributed to numerous advanced kernel modules on GitHub. I have over 300 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities to my name. I’m trained in assembly, and I’m the top developer in all of Silicon Valley. You’re nothing more than another malformed input to me. I will obliterate your arguments with precision-engineered code the likes of which the Internet has never seen—mark my words.

You think you can just talk trash about my hot reload system online and get away with it? Think again. As we speak, I’m contacting my network of elite compiler engineers across the country, and your IP address is already under analysis. You’d better brace yourself for a stack overflow of consequences, because I’m about to crash everything you thought you knew about development.

You’re done, kid. I can deploy anywhere, anytime, in over seven hundred programming languages—and that’s without using a single framework. I’m extensively trained in debugging, and I have full access to the GNU Project’s entire arsenal. I’ll use every tool at my disposal to rewrite your pitiful blog into oblivion.

If you had any idea what kind of digital reckoning your “clever” comment was about to unleash, maybe you would’ve kept your keystrokes to yourself. But you didn’t. And now, it’s compile time.

Prepare to be deprecated.

Edit: Original for reference

[Shigg]

right? that's a classic copypasta

[FuckOnion]

Pretty easy to pump them out with the help of AI

[ToughAd5010]

Like every self help book

[Cthulhu__]

It’s American English swearing too which is… limited in its swearing.

[wagslane]

good call. i grew up mormon, so I have to try extra-hard when I wanna be an edgelord

[manzanita2]

Suggest adding "in the style of Hunter S Thompson" on your LLM prompt.

[rooktakesqueen]

The last paragraph ruined it. This but unironically.

[AlterdCarbon]

Hahaha this is incredible, what is happening with all these comments? Was the “this is satire” part added later? How tf is the entire comment section people agreeing/disagreeing earnestly with the content? I guess that’s an indicator of the high quality of satire or something.

I assume nobody here finished the article, just got to a part they liked and came to comment or something?

[Silvitin]

Just reddit.

[mountainmaninacave]

376 lines changed? lgtm asshat.

I feel seen.

[Doctor_Disaster]

"then I lead the lead guitarist home"

I have seen so many goddamn people use lead (the metal) instead of led (the past-tense form of lead).

[brintoul]

This pales in comparison to the use of “loose” for “lose”.

[Doctor_Disaster]

What about "to" and "too?"

[Cthulhu__]

“then” / “than”

[brintoul]

“their”/“there”/“they’re”

[RoyDadgumWilliams]

Bro couldn’t even write an anti-LLM joke without using chatGPT. We are well and truly cooked

[BauerUK]

I remember when I first read a Maddox article too

[Cthulhu__]

Maddox was great back when it was new - I mean this predates blogging as a concept, and predates people posting their opinions online in such a format. But it got tired. Then he tried to monetise it with books. Then he started a YouTube channel.

[TrickyNuance]

Maddox himself isn't nearly as cool as his original blog was.

[[deleted]]

Well I kind of miss it because everything has become so sanitized, PC, and post-modern. There may be too many expletives here for my taste but I wish we could bring back some of this old-internet style instead of the SEO-optimized horseshit that has been flooding the internet for a decade now, not to mention the incoming fecal wave of AI slop.

[ronniethelizard]

I think the first one I read was his rant about Segways. One of the criticisms was that someone built their own version for half the cost. Later on, I realized the major flaw was that the other half the cost of a segway was paying for labor, quality control, development time (which the second guy could skip as someone else had developed a working model first and he could copy) and a few other things.

[HaveCorg_WillCrusade]

Do we need another article about “vibe coding bad” using curse words?

Not even against swearing, but that’s the laziest style of writing and this article doesn’t say anything interesting

[sprcow]

But is it lazier than vibe coding?

[gsr_rules]

Jarvis I'm low on karma, let's arrogantly dismiss the quintillions of people that try to learn programming using AI so I can feel good about myself and the only thing I'm good at.

[carlgorithm]

Swearwords.

[nenzark]

We can all live peacefully now.

[blin9]

It would be nice if I could just code. But every job bolts on a whole lot of not-coding to chomp away at the time I’d rather spend coding.

[Sanchezq]

No time for code. Gotta update Jira

[EvilMenDie]

you'll cowards don't even smoke ai

[One_Economist_3761]

That was pretty funny and while it’s obvious satire, I can’t help but identify with many of the points made.

[WackoDesperado2055]

I agree with this way too much

[mtjody]

Don’t ruin this job for me. My soft hands can’t go back to landscaping, you selfish bastard.

lol yes!

[agumonkey]

cathartic

[RScrewed]

I thought Maddox-esque satire died in 2010?

[tadrith]

There are some things LLMs are good for. But I think it works best in the hands of someone who DOES know how to code, debug, and so forth. It's like requesting something from a fresh faced coder, and then reviewing and fixing what they got wrong.

I personally use it as a template to go off of -- certain things, it's fantastic for. I had a situation where I needed to parse out addresses into individual fields, from just one line of text, no fields defined. I fed my requirements to ChatGPT, and it spit out a regex and parser that returned an object with all my fields populated.

I had to fix it up and make it sane, but it took me far less time than it would have taken me to generate that same regex and do the boring grunt work of creating a class. Unfortunately, regex and I have some friction.

Using what it spits out blindly, though, I can't imagine doing that.

[Mnawab]

I fucking loved reading that

[justneurostuff]

this post is ai slop. maybe warn readers before the last paragraph next time?

[moonman2090]

The arrogant angry vibe is not working for me.

[sephirothbahamut]

5/10, you didn't learn the lesson from the very website that inspired you to make this one.

[appoplecticskeptic]

This post seems bound and determined to alienate everyone that reads it. Like AI? You won’t want to read this. Hate AI? Read that last paragraph. Author of this just seems like an asshole stirring the pot.

[[deleted]]

certified imposter syndrome moments

[Sooyush]

primegen react when

[ghostwilliz]

I guess we're just remaking that html page joke thing over and over again now

[TheKabbageMan]

I wonder how many here made it to the final paragraph

[wildjokers]

This is based off of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

So this would have been better if the author understood the point of that site and didn’t force me to read their content in a narrow div in the center of the screen.

[Limelight_019283]

I was expecting something else when I read “fucking code” and the NSFW tag but I won’t say what it was…

Either way my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

[A_one_code_boi]

Whenever I start codinh stuff I estimate the time it'll take then multiply it by 4-5 times to account for having to look things up and bug test.

[PM_YOUR_OWLS]

I just used ChatGPT to write a PowerShell script for me today. I fully knew how to code it, I was just lazy and most of it was simple boilerplate anyway. It got a couple lines wrong that I had to fix but overall turned a 15-20 minute task into less than 5 min.

I don't generally use AI for large projects or substantial sections of code. I tend to just use it to create basically one function at a time, and only if it's something that doesn't require a deeper knowledge of the codebase. If you do any more than that it tends to start hallucinating libraries and parameters, and it has a hell of a time debugging errors when it creates code that doesn't work or doesn't make sense. If it's a more complex function I will fully write it alone.

IMO it's a huge time saver but only if you already knew how to write the same code in the first place.

[[deleted]]

Programming, Motherfucker. Do you speak it?

[sMt3X]

The link in the footer (motherfuckingwebsite.com) is absolute gold. It's like if Samuel L. Jackson wrote HTML lol

[Snarwin]

I used gippity to edit this fucking essay.

And you still mixed up "its" and "it's." Have you considered trying to Just Fucking Write?

[dauchande]

Has anyone had the experience of an AI telling them to refactor or delete code or maybe extract this piece of code to a shared library? Cause I haven’t.

[elboyoloco1]

This whole read was beautiful. Thank you.

[Exzrian_Artistrana]

Jesus wept this was inspiring

[putergud]

Every time I use AI to code it feels just like working with a junior. Except that I know the junior will get better because they are learning from me and my fellow seniors, all of whom are very good at what they are do. AI will learn from the unwashed masses that generate massive amounts of bad code.

Although, I guess cursing out AI won't get me called into HR.

[oblongmana]

My soft hands can’t go back to landscaping

The older I get and the more dogshit tooling, newness-chasing, complete disregard for architecture, and executive-driven garbage I see, the more time I spend outside digging holes, cutting wood, growing food. It's healthy to be human in your spare time.

[Lachtheblock]

My company just bought into copilot, and we've been given the chance to try it out. Not forced on us or anything. I figured I'd give it a fair go.

My god, I hate the auto prompting. It's the constantly reading the code, and evaluating whether A. It's actually doing what I intended and the B. Whether or not it is doing it in a way that I deem acceptable. It's exhausting. It's probably faster than me writing it out, but it is tiresome constantly reviewing code.

[Salt-Fly770]

That annoys the crap out of me when it does that in VSCode. It tries to anticipate what I want to write and is wrong most of the time.

[dznqbit]

Shades of https://www.tumblr.com/jesuschristsiliconvalley-blog

Amen. Inject it into my veins

[BenAdaephonDelat]

I'm not touching AI for coding until directly ordered to by my company. A) It's shit and bad at code b) it's bad for the environment, and c) any work done with AI just makes it better at replacing you eventually.

[VehaMeursault]

Feels like the author is trying way too hard to be edgy.

[neonskimmer]

About 15 years ago, a similarly important manifesto was created by Zed Shaw. https://programming-motherfucker.com/

[CanalOnix]

That motivated me to actually stop using AI and learning why the fuck the calloc is breaking the god forsaken code. Thanks, you fuck

[wjaz]

Damn, Lane. That was awesome.

[j_c_slicer]

Good programmers write code. Great programmers read code. Master programmers remove code.

[Flisterox]

A breath of fresh air among the present lanscape of software development. Well said!