I feel like I just need somewhere to run right now and I don’t have anywhere really. I’ve started this new job about a month ago and the whole schtick was that we’d be rewriting this old app to meet a tight deadline and immediately putting it on a code freeze to make something better to replace it.

fine, I get it, tight deadlines and lots to do of course you going to tempted to use AI. when youre architecting a complex application on top of APIs that you’ve not worked with before you’re going to miss stuff anyway. But honestly, out of the four of us, two of the mobile devs are some of the biggest pig shits I’ve ever had to work with. fundamentally having to explain that this guy can’t just merge his changes into the main branch, or not to leave file spanning comments spat out by Gemini to explain the code that he’s not even bothered to read, A shit that goes beyond being in a rush to not being competent to do the job you’ve been given.

again, fine, I can get around some of this with the promise of slowing down and picking up The new projects and enforcing some higher quality standards which everyone supposedly wishes for. fine.

nope. whilst me and the other competent dev are trying to sort out the slop that has been dumped on the app in question over the last month, the deadline has passed us (something which I said was going to happen but was ignored), and the two vibe coders have complained that they “don’t have any work to do” And on now architecting the next fucking project with senior team members whilst I’m getting grilled over “why is XYZ taking so long?” because the fucking vibe code is vibe coded that you fucking hacks and you rewarded them with this new project.

it’s disheartening, because I said all of this upfront, but because I wasn’t the first person in the team out of the gate my opinions are basically worth as much as this rant will (understandably) be worth to most of you: pittance.

I’m not the best programmer on earth, not even the most experienced, but it does my fucking head in to have imposter syndrome every time I log into work every morning because there are two sodding imposters in front of me getting the credit!!! absolute dog shit.

I don’t know. round time. free Palestine and free Iran and death 2 America xxx

  • doleoEnglish
    18·
    1 day ago

    Well, I think you could have applied it to people just using AI for assistance, but now it’s basically people straight up submitting 100% generated code. Often without even looking at, let alone understanding, what the bot spat out.

      • doleoEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        Line goes up, nobody cares

      • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        1 day ago

        It really is, from both a security perspective and an efficiency one. When you write code, each line is an instruction to the computer to do something specific. Basically “Add X and Y together and give me back the result as A” would be one line, then “Show A on the screen to the user” is another for simple addition. Part of a programmer’s job is reducing the number of instructions to as few lines as possible because each line is another piece of memory stored as part of the program’s file size and another instruction sent to the processor.

        The more lines of code, the more instructions you give, and the more variables you have (X, Y, and A in the above example), the more memory and processor power the computer uses. The reason something like Doom runs on pregnancy tests is because it was made in an era where the programmers were trying to slim it down as much as possible to run on a bunch of different PCs. Meanwhile, modern shooters are strangled by capitalist deadlines and crunch, so they aren’t given the time to trim down code.

        • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          12·
          1 day ago

          I would push back a bit on “as few lines as possible” for two reasons:

          1. Modern compilers coupled with extended instruction sets have gotten so good that premature optimization can often make things less performant than just writing straightforward code and letting the compiler do its thing—empirical testing is a must. However, what you said is absolutely true when talking about programming in assembly and much more true when talking about old compilers (which is what programmers were dealing with in the time period you’re talking about).
          2. Readability is important for maintainability, so even if some convoluted one-liner is more performant, it may not be worth the maintenance headache unless it makes a significant impact on performance (certainly the case for something like Quake III’s famous fast square root!).

           

          That said, I totally agree with the overall thrust of your comment—I love reading old assembly code and seeing how the programmers of yore were able to do so much with so little, and that spirit seems to have been completely lost in the quest for More Product. It’ll be interesting to see if the coming DRAM shortage will have any impact on that; my guess is no, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.

          You might be interested in a talk I posted a while back that traces the history of object-oriented programming and how it all went wrong as well as this post about eschewing game engines. And I’m guessing you might be familiar, but Kaze Emanuar does some fascinating videos about squeezing every last bit of performance out of the N64, sparing no technical details. Oh, also this blog post from Dan Luu about web bloat. Okay, I’ll stop with the links, but it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.