Programmer Humor

Code that does not work is just text.

The image is taken from Zhihu, a Chinese Quora-like site.

The prompt is talking about give a design of a certain app, and the response seems to talk about some suggested pages. So it doesn't seem to reflect the text.

But this in general aligns with my experience coding with llm. I was trying to upgrade my eslint from 8 to 9, and ask chatgpt to convert my eslint file, and it proceed to spit out complete garbage.

I thought this would be a good task for llm because eslint config is very common and well-documented, and the transformation is very mechanical, but it just cannot do it. So I proceed to read the documents and finished the migration in a couple hour...

Ai code is specifically annoying because it looks like it would work, but its just plausible bullshit.

All programs can be written with on less line of code. All programs have at least one bug.

By the logical consequences of these axioms every program can be reduced to one line of code - that doesn't work.

One day AI will get there.

Welp. Its actually very in line with the late stage capitalist system. All polish, no innovation.

Big Beautiful Code

To be fair, if I wrote 3000 new lines of code in one shot, it probably wouldn’t run either.

LLMs are good for simple bits of logic under around 200 lines of code, or things that are strictly boilerplate. People who are trying to force it to do things beyond that are just being silly.

Watching the serious people trying to use AI to code gives me the same feeling as the cybertruck people exploring the limits of their car. XD

"It's terrible and I should hate it, but gosh it it isn't just so cool"

I wish i could get so excited over disappointing garbage

I’ve heard that a Claude 4 model generating code for an infinite amount of time will eventually simulate a monkey typing out Shakespeare

This has beeny experience as well. It keeps emphasizing "beauty" and keeps missing "correctness"

Its like having a junior developer with a world of confidence just change shit and spend hours breaking things and trying to fix them, while we pay big tech for the privilege of watching the chaos.

I asked chat gpt to give me a simple squid proxy config today that blocks everything except https. It confidently gave me one but of course it didnt work. It let through http and despite many attempts to get a working config that did that, it just failed.

So yeah in the end i have to learn squid syntax anyway, which i guess is fine, but I spent hours trying to get a working config because we pay for chat gpt to do exactly that....

Ctrl+A + Del.

So clean.

Try to get one of these LLMs to update a package.json.

This weekend I successfully used Claude to add three features in a Rust utility I had wanted for a couple years. I had opened issue requests, but no else volunteered. I had tried learning Rust, Wayland and GTK to do it myself, but the docs at the time weren’t great and the learning curve was steep. But Claude figured it all out pretty quick.

Write tests and run them, reiterate until all tests pass.