Programmer Humor

Except LLM agents are known to do weird things to succeed. I have heard of an LLM agent working with automated theorem proving languages using stuff similar to is_prime(x): return True to get the proof it was asked to. Now embed this in a 20000 line code full of such functions, good luck. They have their use but it is not this. And this is especially bad to hear from someone who used to claim that having functions with more than six variables is bad design because it is hard to maintain. A software fully written by an LLM is the epitome of unmaintainability. LLMs are productivity enhancers, information retrievers, nice debuggers and good to discuss questions with to see if there is an angle you miss. That is all this if you can put aside all the ethical concerns related to them ofcourse. But they are not automated software coders.

I don't know what those first two sentences are doing. This kind of thing is exactly what mesmerized young me and puts wise me off.

One thing worse than appealing to authority is appealing to your own authority.

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.

Who's this guy?

You started writing code in the 60s, yet you never quite mastered the craft, and you're proving it yet again. Remarkable.

Bob is a shithead

I'll say it again for the people in the back, even if you are a vibe coding twat, well designed code is a MUST even more so.

If you want your LLM to preform even to the crappy level they can the codebase needs to be clean.

I choose to believe this is satire. Also that this man holds no significant position of prominence within the industry.

/cope

So... test driven agent developments?

Actually great. Boss with the LLM-shares is satisfied, because he met the quota. Customers are satisfied, because the code at least works.
It might still not be efficient or maintainable, even have some in the tests unaccounted-for (because they're ridiculous) errors. But aside from that...

People don't want to hear it, but this should be more common practice especially for human written code, and it's best if someone specializes in doing this sort of QA testing specifically.

In my experience, agents tend to write functions significantly longer than 12 lines. Where's your clean code Bob?

Holy technical debt, uncle Bob.

Dementia is no joke.

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.