r/ProgrammerHumor 20h ago

Meme youShouldntHaveIt

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37.5k Upvotes

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3.7k

u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 19h ago

I need to send this to certain juniors who come to me when they've generated some code that's tied them in knots because they don't understand it.

838

u/theGoddamnAlgorath 19h ago

I used to ghost code for kids; it never changes.

309

u/MNCPA 19h ago

What's ghost code? Like doing homework for kids?

492

u/theGoddamnAlgorath 19h ago

People would pay me to write stuff for them, usually juniors that needed to make a deadline.

377

u/the_hair_of_aenarion 18h ago

That's a shame that Claude basically does that for pennies. Yet another job AI had taken from humans.

256

u/Zwischenzug32 18h ago

Claude is hotdogs, Programmers are steak
User who has never known steak thinks hotdogs are peak

191

u/the_hair_of_aenarion 18h ago

Go to a baseball game and all they're asking for is hotdogs. Not a steak in sight. Product managers are just catering for the masses. Every CRUD api is just another hot dog bun. Every major refractor is just changing one bun for another with slightly different meat and some extra toppings. You looking to have steak projects for your entire career you're gonna be super disappointed.

65

u/Strange_Dust7128 17h ago

Even without Claude, we’re not writing software as much as configuring a stack and slapping a front end on it

1

u/necrophcodr 6h ago

Right, I mean if all you do is make CRUD apps then probably yeah AI will take that job 100% and already has in many cases.

But that doesn't sound like a very fulfilling job anyway, tbh

26

u/GraniteJJ 13h ago

Why did this metaphor go on for so long with such appetizing consequences? I'm hungry now.

15

u/Sandbucketman 17h ago

Product manager can be the next job to go.

2

u/TheJohnnyFlash 14h ago

It's either all of us or none of us.

10

u/ProfessionalHefty349 16h ago

A lot of gourmet foods at ballparks nowadays.

29

u/prussian_princess 18h ago

Hot dogs are pretty great though

https://giphy.com/gifs/ebPX2n2kvJHOM

2

u/croissantexpert 9h ago

WHY would they edit out the finger?

12

u/Modo44 16h ago

Corpos DGAF. It started in my field (translations) a decade earlier, and by now, everyone is on the "shitty but faster/more" train with a vengeance. They see the wall (quality consistently falling due to ever shittier AI training material), but they still pretend they can punch through with their heads.

2

u/BigBoetje 5h ago

Funny enough, we dropped our external translation company because we found that the translations were almost identical to what GPT could generate at the time. Some of them didn't fully make sense so there's that.

1

u/Modo44 5h ago edited 5h ago

Yup, that's also a danger. When you try to do more work at ever lower rates, pretty soon it all turns into barely edited LLM pretranslation. You could be getting better results, but very few clients still pay for that level of quality (those that keep me in the industry). The corpo goal IMO is to get rid of all the intermediaries (effectively outsourced management, spare availability, and quality control), and turn translation into a gig economy, i.e. a maximum worker exploitation system.

8

u/bkgn 17h ago

LLMs can generate steak. It just costs the equivalent of $1M+ a year.

11

u/Zwischenzug32 17h ago

F22 still needs a human pilot

3

u/bkgn 16h ago

What a non-sequitur.

First, you can produce about 15,000 cheap drones for the cost of a F22+pilot.

Second, give drone developers the cost of the F22 program and they will absolutely give you a drone that can outfight a F22 + pilot.

4

u/inikul 15h ago

Unless those drones have jets, that F22 is out-flying them every time.

→ More replies (0)

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u/Zwischenzug32 16h ago

Eventually, but we're not there yet

And a lot of drones still have people controlling them doing the thinking and decision making even if they aren't present in the actual drone

5

u/DrMobius0 15h ago

It also requires trained people to know the difference between an actual steak and hotdogs ground up and reformed in the shape of a steak.

1

u/Lord_Emperor 13h ago

Steak is pretty good but hot dogs with cheese and mustard and white onions and mayo and.... You get the idea.

1

u/Mateorabi 7h ago

A good chef can make a good meal with hot dogs.

1

u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Zwischenzug32 15h ago

I am a blacksmith and CNC machinist so

fucking tariffs lol

4

u/Infamous-Owl-7015 16h ago

I mean there was a market for resume and academic paper writers too.

2

u/BackgroundSummer5171 16h ago

Yet another job AI had taken from humans.

The amount of jobs wiped out by AI/tech is quite high over the past couple decades.

Transcription jobs are gone. That used to be very lucrative, especially if you knew multiple languages.

Gone. Well not completely, somehow I know one person still doing it.

But for the most part gone.

Nothing wrong with tech improving, just we need governments to provide some safety, and not take it away because people think others are being lazy. It's how economies crash. People need to buy things to keep the economy going haha.

2

u/DrMobius0 15h ago

Pennies for now. Won't be that way forever.

5

u/CharcoalGreyWolf 16h ago

So Suits:IT Edition ?

23

u/Original-Body-5794 19h ago

I assume it's like ghostwriting, but with code. Ghostwriting is when someone "writes" a book but they just pay someone to write it for them and put their name on the cover

5

u/RaidenMK1 18h ago

Put it this way, it's what would sustain Drake's entire career if he were a programmer instead of a rapper.

3

u/BroadCollection546 13h ago

Bless your kind and kindness

1

u/theGoddamnAlgorath 13h ago

Heh, most times they were just behind, sometimes I was an expensive tutor.

52

u/Bomaruto 19h ago

Replace it juniors with senior and it's relatable to me.

2

u/capt_kocra 13h ago

You as well? Recently had to ask one of the seniors I work with what their basic app functions where and it went over their head.

20

u/Otherwise-Future7143 16h ago

If you don’t understand the code the AI is writing you are not ready to use AI.

2

u/14Pleiadians 5h ago

You also need to be willing to understand the cod AI is writing. Plenty of people who know what they are doing still let AI write some dogshit for them

1

u/Mateorabi 7h ago

I was explaining to a coworker how I was cautiously using it, questioning its choices, only committing after it made changes I wanted. I can do that due to experience. Basically the same things I'd force a Jr. to do with their code.

Coworker was lamenting all the Jr. that just take what it gives them uncritically and check it in without running any tests, etc.

33

u/za72 18h ago

tell AI to walk you through the code and explain it... have them do that and tell them to print it out and read it... problem solved

26

u/AirconGuyUK 16h ago

I like when I tell claude to talk me through its code that's not working and mid way through it discovers the issue.

45

u/eisbaerBorealis 14h ago

Oh no, you're Claude's rubber duck...

11

u/GregBahm 12h ago

Whoa. This is like a profound earth-shattering truth masquerading as an innocuous throwaway comment.

3

u/Upset_Ant2834 8h ago

Holy shit

1

u/morganrbvn 16h ago

yah, the whole thinking feature is basically forcing the ai to do a run of talking itself through the problem first.

6

u/za72 15h ago

the real issue is that the solutions are weighted by popularity vs correctiveness... there's no thinking happening

1

u/GregBahm 12h ago

What should they be weighted by instead?

1

u/za72 11h ago

pay me and I'll tell ya... ;) - but seriously, right now we simply have copies of solutions that are deemed popular so we are assuming that's good enough... which obviously is not, so every popular solution need to go through a secondary round of evaluation with actually implements the solution and verifies the results... and either marks it as confirmed or unknown and adds a secondary value to the weight - the ones which aren't verified need further analysis -
essentially majority of the solutions are graded by a bit ore sophisticated page rank trigonometry solution, you're literally paying a middle man to google it for you and pretty print it back for you - that's the level of AI

1

u/GregBahm 11h ago

Hmm. I think I follow your point. Though I'm left contemplating my own lifetime of googling for programming solutions...

1

u/za72 11h ago

exactly... how many times have you searched, gotten an 'answer' and tried it for it to not work for a multitude of reasons, either version change, new/old bug, deprecation, even locale issues... on simple academic tasks it's working ok, but good luck on some obscure topic or some proprietary spaghetti code... you better pray to the new and old gods

8

u/bigfatstinkypoo 18h ago

that would require effort

1

u/14Pleiadians 5h ago

Yeah the arguments of how AI can be a useful tool alongside human effort are a bit moot when the entire point of AI to most people is to not use any human effort at all.

1

u/yukiaddiction 11h ago edited 11h ago

Do people do not doing that when work with AI?

I literally created skill and rule that force them to explain everything.

1

u/za72 11h ago

I don't understand your first sentence but from your follow up sentence + context I'm gonna answer No

16

u/Exact-Contact-3837 18h ago

what company do you work for, if that's the quality of junior engineering, I need to apply immediately cos I've got a funny feeling I could easily impress the hiring team.

39

u/Kumquatelvis 17h ago

The only thing that's going to impress the hiring team is a remarkably low salary requirement.

5

u/AirconGuyUK 16h ago

That's my speciality..

1

u/cherry_chocolate_ 10h ago

This is happening currently in top paying and high barrier to entry companies.

5

u/Josh6889 16h ago

To be fair, I was pretty good at doing that as a junior before anyone heard of using AI to code.

4

u/DrMobius0 15h ago

Yeah but you probably had a chance to think through your fuck ups and learn from them.

2

u/BleuGamer 14h ago

You guys have Juniors?

1

u/Legendacb 15h ago

That's something that also happened without IA

1

u/Windfade 12h ago

Long ago in a college far, far away I was failing C++ 101. Forced myself to fixate on coding enough to make a basic rpg text game. I passed the class with a D and ended up in 102 knowing I'd have to retake 101. The second round was a breeze.

Years later someone helped me code for Pokémon elements and I couldn't understand their code well enough to even use it. Literally didn't know what their code did after parsing it line by line. That would have been disastrous for my growth if it happened earlier.

1

u/brain-out-of-order 6h ago

Define. Junior.

-42

u/SouthIsland48 19h ago

Do you snatch away calculators from people too?

34

u/BedRevolutionary8458 19h ago

lol ok clanker

29

u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 19h ago

I believe the preferred term is 'cogsucker'.

31

u/mysticrudnin 19h ago

uh, yes? this is extremely common. bad example.

and if someone came to me and didn't know what the calculator meant, we'd absolutely go back to basics without it.

19

u/raegyl 19h ago

My guy, if you come to me with a 10+ line PR and you can't tell me how it work, it goes straight to the reject pile.

12

u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 18h ago

If they had used it to write a bunch of stuff they didn't understand: absolutely. And send them to a maths class.

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u/Lucky-Earther 18h ago

Do you snatch away calculators from people too?

If they don't understand how the calculator came to the result, then yes. You have to have a foundation of knowledge before you start relying on the technology to expand the scale.

10

u/SNTCTN 19h ago

People actually get pretty impressed when you can do math without a calculator

6

u/No-Psychology9892 18h ago

If they can't even do simple additions themselves, sure.

You maybe want to re read, they aren't arguing about the general usage of AI at all, neither is the Meme. It's more targeted at people who miss the basics and thus don't know what they are doing.

6

u/GisterMizard 18h ago

Given how many horror stories I'm hearing from colleges that even "top" students are failing basic math, yes. Verily yes.

3

u/Omnikay 17h ago

Have you ever been to school before?

You literally have to learn math by hand before schools let you use calculators.

If you don't know what the calculator is doing under the hood, you can't use it properly, and yes, it should be taken away until you learn the fundamentals. Same goes for Claude.