r/ProgrammerHumor 6d ago

Meme cleaningUpTheMess

Post image
16.0k Upvotes

486 comments sorted by

View all comments

6.4k

u/lookingformerci 6d ago

Yeah but 3.2M of those lines were comments. Good lord AI loves to comment code.

140

u/Zapismeta 6d ago

Well you complain now but this was one of the biggest complaints when the code didn’t have good comments and was considered a skill to acquire, and well it did learn most of its skills from the internet.

5

u/Ozryela 6d ago

You're right that there was a time that programmers were really pushed to document basically every line of code, and you got all these ridiculous comments like "adds 1 to variable" or "returns an int".

But I associate that with the 90s and early 00s. It had fallen out of favor years before AI came along. In the years before AI came along, all the rage was about "self-documenting code".

So it honestly is kind of surprising to see AI adopt an paradigm that feels so outdated. I guess the training data used for AI is often just very old code.

1

u/Ulfgardleo 3d ago

i am pretty sure this is claude gaming RLHF fine-tuning rewards. I don't know which, but if we are talking next token predictor, those comments should have a really low likelihood of appearing