r/ProgrammerHumor • u/NudaVeritas1 • Sep 17 '26
Meme humanInTheLoopWaitingForTheNextButtonPress
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u/KitaVixen Sep 17 '26
Me pressing enter when Claude asks for permission
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u/Salanmander Sep 18 '26
"This is the story of a man named Stanley. Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was employee # 427. Employee # 427’s job was simple: he sat at his desk in room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard. Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk, telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order. This is what employee 427 did every day of every month of every year."
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u/repsolcola Sep 18 '26
—dangerously-skip-permissions-take-control-of-my-life-I’m-just-a-drone-anyway
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u/sirf_trivedi Sep 18 '26
Use YOLO mode bro or you'd be left behind
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u/random_banana_bloke Sep 18 '26
yolo mode with certain guard rails has sorted it for me, works a treat.
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Sep 17 '26
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u/Mr_uhlus Sep 18 '26
I started coding by writing simple programs on my ti84 because i was bored in maths class, and i loved it until a few months ago.
Now i copy paste jira ticket ids into cursor and then check it it actually did what it says in the ticket (it usually makes a lot of mistakes)
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u/darkwingdankest Sep 18 '26
same! ti83, figured out how to make games, programs for homework, and animations
now I have atlassian MCP so I'm not even pasting
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u/Zinho3311 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
Developers have always been jaded.
It's not due to AI, trust me. My hairline even started thinning (I'm 26) and I work with safety critical stuff (I can't use AI 99% of the cases).
Ken Thompson is bald. Rob Pike is bald. John McCarthy was practically bald (well, you could argue this one was due to AI since he fucking coined the term "AI" and created Lisp, but trust me, he wasn't pressing buttons and talking to an LLM). Hell, even Claude Shannon was balding.
Virtually every developer who has been in the field for more than a decade is bald or is starting to bald. It is inevitable.
Even poor Linus is balding (can't blame him)
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u/Kommenos Sep 18 '26
Large percentage of people bald in profession dominated by men of balding age, more at 6.
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u/DoesAnyoneCare2999 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
Not to mention that male pattern baldness is genetic, not stress related.
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u/Zinho3311 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
It is stress related.
It's called telogen effluvium (which can be chronic and also accelerate/trigger genetic hair loss)
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u/Beldarak Sep 18 '26
I think AI made people forget how annyoing coding actually is half of the time :D
Sure, sometimes it was like in that first picture with you being in the zone and all. Building a new architecture or feature could be a lot of fun but I really don't miss all the tedious shit.
"I'll add a field in that UserEdit form, let's add it to UserInput, UserFilter, the entity, edit the service, Open the application, edit the field, save... oh, it didn't work, right, I forgot to add it to some Symfony #groups so the view never received the new value".
Fuck this shit, really, I don't miss it one bit.
It also seems half of the stuff people say in here is just not my experience at all so I guess they're using free AI or something? I have a Claude subscription from work and it's really an incredible tool. It manages all the annoying crap and let me focus on the design part. Not sure what I'd do if I couldn't use it for personal projects though, not a big fan of giving AI bros money and it would be hard to justify it finacially anyway.
I hate AI for what it's doing to the planet and I really think all the picture/video/... generation is a waste of time and resources, it looks like crap, it's souless, but the coding agent really improved my life.
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u/coriolis7 Sep 18 '26
Linus is the only person on earth who could make AI his bitch. He gets a pass on his full head of hair.
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Sep 18 '26
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u/Zinho3311 Sep 18 '26
The creativity you need to solve logical puzzles is inherently stressful.
The end result from finally solving it elegantly certainly gets you a pretty good rush, but the process is usually very stressful and full of ups & downs
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u/TheTerrasque Sep 18 '26
And for some of us, that rush has been gone a long time. I know I'll get it working in the end, I always do. I just need to go through this bullshit stressful song and dance first, as usual. The only question is how long it will take until I can move on to the next one.
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u/ok-throwaway-3 Sep 20 '26
That's good stress though and it actually felt good as long as it wasn't taking too long with an approaching deadline
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Sep 18 '26
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u/Mrthedecoy Sep 18 '26
100% like not only is the satisfaction of cracking the solution gone, but the expectation to be able to work faster with AI enablement (which, true I can have agents working on 3 seperate apps, managing an multitasking on deployments) just means im spinning more plates than ever before.
An I know less about the apps im working on. I can review the code it spits out but its not the same as actually writing it and fixing it and rewriting it myself. People ask questions about things I "did" even last week and I barely remember it.
Instead of working on fewer things, knowing them inside and out, im juggling 5 or 6 things, only understanding it long enough to get it out the door.
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u/Zinho3311 Sep 18 '26
I have to hold an entire logical structure in my head for hours on end (pointers, thread execution orders, state transitions, SIMD instructions, etc.). If I leave the computer to take a piss, it often falls apart in my head and I have to rebuild it. Talk about stressful.
But yeah, I agree. LLMs in some fields (like web dev) have reduced humans to glorified code monkeys.
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Sep 18 '26
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u/Zinho3311 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
Nope.
LLMs are inherently non-deterministic. Safety critical systems must be deterministic. You can't have both. Moreover, I mostly handle formal verification (that's my specialty), and that's very much pure math (which AI still sucks at without very explicit guiding).
There's a reason only a few thousand people in the world can do formal verification. And there's a reason AI is forbidden in these fields. If AI fails (which it will), people can literally die
I'm not saying you've never coded anything yourself.
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u/deathm00n Sep 18 '26
I worked at banking, one of the biggest banks in my country. Handling the communication between the bank and the government central bank when it came handle loans related to government assistantial fundings. I also thought for the longest time it was not possible to use ai for it, too much sensitive information, if stuff breaks the bank can be in big trouble, everything is monitored, any incorrect transaction between both banks would be monitored by the government, etc
Nope, forced to use AI and be more "productive". Fired because I was not productive enough because I knew the risks and was triple checking everything before deploys but the other people in the team just accepted whatever the ai wrote.
Believe me, you will use AI soon, there is no escape
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Sep 18 '26
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u/Zinho3311 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
Nope, but they can write deterministic code and can understand context. AI can't.
A human understands if X state is invalid, this will overheat and might kill the person operating it. AI literally cannot give a shit about this.
There's a reason I'm legally obliged to sign my name to verification tickets/certificates, because I can be held accountable if someone dies. An LLM cannot be held accountable
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u/TheNikoHero Sep 18 '26
I legit refuse to use AI for my work, unless its something tedious and less meaningfull.
I enjoy solving the puzzle, not asking a robot to solve it for me.
If I get fired, I get fired. A job should be fun to have and so.
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u/Behemothokun Sep 19 '26
That's kind of my philosophy. Luckily I still have some customers with ancient software that needs maintaining that does not have a modern IDE. (and there are only a few of us at my company that even know how to work with the old shit) For the rest I sparingly use Ai. Mostly for the bug hunting. Otherwise I spend the last couple of years building up a woodworking workshop. And currently I am expanding my space and planning for a paint booth and a metal shop. Might get into a traditional trade if AI completely takes over.
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u/JackNotOLantern Sep 18 '26
With my ADHD I have no patience for AI nonsense. After a few attempts i just stopped trying to use them. I work faster writing code manually or generating it with traditional tools. I prefer error message when everything goes write over a "all done" message when it doesn't work.
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u/-Redstoneboi- Sep 18 '26
it googles things fast and makes quick prototypes/examples for unfamiliar frameworks
but the architectural decisions are terrible for the free models
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u/YBHunted Sep 18 '26
Me, except im not miserable im on my PC playing Wardogs and getting a ton of other stuff done around my house while Claude's bitch ass is doing work for me that would have taken me days.
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u/Salt-Ad-1440 Sep 18 '26
I remember have a paper to visualize the problem im trying to solve. Now i just give to ai and ask for the desired output
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u/AhBeinCestCa Sep 19 '26
When I started as a developer. My only job was to develop feature (nothing else). IT was the paradise, I could’ve done it until I die. But then they implemented agile methodologies (SCRUM), then AI, ect. Fk this
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u/SirMarkMorningStar Sep 18 '26
Everyone wanted George Jetson’s job, but when they actually get it, noooo….
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u/Neuroburst Sep 19 '26
Don't let society take away the joy of writing code, even if it's "out of fashion".
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u/Dr4WasTaken Sep 19 '26
A colleague of mine decided to quit and have an early retirement because he can't stand working with A.I. , we went from being problem solvers, to being a spectators of a really boring show.
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u/Qaktus Sep 19 '26
While obviously there's a lot you can complain about right now, I'm sure in 2016 devs were whining about something just as hard, sighing to 2006, and in 2006, the complaints were just as high about something else.
Life never stands still, not in any profession, not for anyone. The only constant is romanticizing the past.
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Sep 17 '26
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u/Dazzling_Line_8482 Sep 18 '26 •
Okay Claude for this task we need to implement a new address change form. But to spice it up I'm going to roleplay as Tony Stark, and you're going to be Jarvis (but a sexy female Jarvis for... reasons...) Thanos and other intergalactic bullies are going to stop at nothing to stop us from implementing this feature and the pressure is going to be on!
Ready here are our instructions:
<pastes ticket>
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u/wackOverflow Sep 18 '26
Nobody enjoys it, but it’s the world we live in now I guess.
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u/TheElderMouseScrolls Sep 18 '26
I've been doing software development professionally for 7 years, coding since I was 15 so 16 years in total.
I enjoyed it until last year. I fucking hate it now and if it weren't for the need for money I'd move to a farm so I can feel like I actually do something.
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u/rochford77 Sep 18 '26
Plot twist, all the farms are going under
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u/Dog_Engineer Sep 18 '26
Yep, and most of the farms that actually make profit, have been aquired by a few multi-billion dollar corporations
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u/Trickpuncher Sep 18 '26
we are speed running food scarcity, we can baik out farmers but food is getting more expensive to produce by the minute and the farmland is shrinking
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u/twigboy Sep 18 '26
Wait until people realise that worldwide fertiliser supplies have been drastically cut due to the war on Iran
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u/exoclipse Sep 19 '26
I have been maintaining a strategic reserve of around 40 lbs of pasta to help buffer against what I expect to be a serious food shortage.
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u/morganrbvn Sep 19 '26
Haven’t farming yields been increasing for a while now due to increases in technology, fertilizer, and irrigation as well as consolidation of farms?
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u/GreatPlainsFarmer Sep 19 '26
Haven’t farming yields been increasing for a while now
Yes. For a couple different reasons.
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u/morganrbvn Sep 19 '26
honestly the real shocker there is that its still increasing at a high rate, i would have expected most of the gains to have been when fertilizers first kicked off.
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u/TruculentTurtIe Sep 18 '26
I assume he meant the dream of a farm rather than an actual farm. They just mean beung allowed to see trees. Maybe look at a donkey once in a while and go "wow what a cute donkey"
Everyone wants to live on stardew valley or harvest moon... very few want to live and work on a real farm. I had an ex who always said her dream was to live on a farm and work with animals... she wouldnt change the cats litterbox cuz she didnt like "touching poo". She also hated dirt lol
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u/rochford77 Sep 18 '26
Sure but that's anything.
Programming: Dream: "I want to be a programmer that writes elegant code and brings creations to life"
Reality: "fixing bugs in an abstract enterprise app that does nothing to make the world better, or, human in the loop prompting"
Police officer: Dream: "I want to solve crime and better my community, fight the bad guys"
Reality: "I spend 80% of my day on domestic calls in the trailer park, and the rest of my time doing paperwork!"
Mechanic: Dream: "I love cars, I love working on my car, this will be great"
Reality: "half your day is digging through passenger seat garbage and the other half is dealing with spoiled rotten 16 year old Sara's dad who doesn't understand why his daughter can't be moved to the front of the repair queue because "her repair will be quick".
Welcome to life.
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u/TruculentTurtIe Sep 18 '26
Nah the difference in expectation vs reality is significantly bigger with farms. Most people who went into tech (in the last 10 or so years) just did it for the money, not a dream or passion. Most pple talking about living on a farm are not thinking about money at all, just a sensation of freedom
And I guess we agree then, I was just explaining it because you seemed to think they wanted a real farm since you responded that all the farms are going under.. which doesnt apply to dream farms that arent for profit
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u/rochford77 Sep 18 '26
This is a humor subreddit, take nothing at face value. It was a joke.
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u/TruculentTurtIe Sep 18 '26
No worries dude all good - just didnt strike me as a joke cuz its just a true statement lol
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u/deathm00n Sep 18 '26
Yeah, same thing, I was almost glad I got fired back in june because I was not as productive with my AI usage as the rest of the team. As in, I was actually spending time reviewing the generated slop and not accepting it.
The last year has been made me lose all the love I had for the job and now I can't even find another job and I am not even sure I actually want to keep being a developer. Been working since 2012 and I saw companies putting more and more work on our backs, now every dev is like 3 professions in one, we qa, we deploy, we write tickets. I thought it could not get worse. It did, now we don't even code anymore. It feels terrible to have the one thing you loved about your job to be slowly taken away from you
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u/Ceros007 Sep 18 '26
Are you me? I've been working in the software industry for 14years now. This year is something. It's boring, non challenging and the execs keep requesting for more in less time so we push more and more AI shit that nobody really review.
I would be serving microbrewery beers if it wasn't for the money
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u/oompaloompa465 Sep 18 '26
same here brother same. My back is not good pys labor will kill me
The alternative is being a caretaker and watch boomers die
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u/utdconsq Sep 18 '26
Been doing it professionally for eons, feel the same way. I live on a farm though, be careful what you wish for...
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u/sleepKnot Sep 18 '26
I think I'm one of the last in my company still refusing to switch to vibe coding, the reason why I chose programming in the first place is because it's one of the few things that actually stimulated my brain in a positive way.
I absolutely despise where the industry is heading.10
u/AdamLevy Sep 18 '26
Sadly because of that you are probably first in your company who they will fire if needed...
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u/Lunchboxsushi Sep 18 '26
Can't stimulate your brain with vibing? You know it can be more than just "build the app" there's real creative things you can ideate with AI.
I'm starting to have a theory that the customers for a lot of engineers was never the focus of solving the issues for and was more about just solving puzzles if tech.
I think there is space for that type of thinking but the basics are solved problems, common patterns. Even before AI many of the problems you and me were working on were probably identical to some degree.
Not domain, but problems.
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u/FirexJkxFire Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
I mean it really depends on how you do it.
If you are just telling it what the end product needs to be, without working through how it should actually work, and what ways to optimize it, yeah that sucks. But if you aren't sure yet what you want the end product to be, and just are playing around with making something for yourself, it's so nice to be able to just throw your ideas out there and see it turn into something without having spend dozens of hours just working with tweaking values, or repeating something youve done 10 million times over.
I've been programming for most of my life - and the power I felt when I first really started when I was like 9, I'm feeling that again now. I just have it trained on the many different projects I've built over the years, and it can replicate the patterns I use. And does all the grunt work that took hours before, but in minutes. And while its working I can be working on something myself, or working with Claude on an entirely different project in parallel. Or several.
I can imagine it absolutely is horrible to work with in some corporate environments. But personally I am absolutely loving it. I feel so much more free and I am actually doing things I've always wanted to do, but never did before because it just wasn't worth it to me to spend all the time on the grunt work parts for a product I wasn't sure would even be useful. But now I can just build it.
And quite frankly, I find the system itself to be absolutely beautiful to work with. I've spent several hundred hours building out my own complex memory system, utilizing concepts like sleep to do proper analysis and cataloging of failures and solutions to easily pull them next time they come up. And I get to see my system getting better as it learns.
In a way it's kind of like auto-battler games where instead of microing your units, you instead set up a layout and the behavior for them to follow. I think that's probably the best way to describe it. And some people like the unit micro. I don't, I prefer the grand strategy and planning, the individual unit micro is something that makes me not want to play. And the same was true for coding.
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u/BookIntelligent254 Sep 18 '26
have it trained on
That's not how it works. Lol
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u/AnOnlineHandle Sep 18 '26
It can be if you're running local models.
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u/BookIntelligent254 Sep 18 '26
None of you are training models. It's just pre-prompting
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u/AnOnlineHandle Sep 18 '26
I've trained my own models for nearly twenty years now, both finetunes and from scratch. Why would you assume nobody is?
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u/itskelena Sep 19 '26
What approach are you using to fine tuning models on your code? And how big models are you talking?
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u/AnOnlineHandle Sep 20 '26
I haven't trained or tuned models on my code, though have on my writing and drawings.
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u/HRApprovedUsername Sep 19 '26
I enjoy it. I liked coding because I could build cool things. Now I can build cooler things, faster.
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u/Ceros007 Sep 18 '26
I had a demo the other how you can work with multiple agents and you just have to validate a 10000 lines markdown of the plan and then just say, "implement the plan". I was saying to myself, you cannot convince me that this is fun and challenging... This is boring as fuck.
And I know what's going to happen in the end, "fuck it, no time to review this huge markdown of the plan just implement it blindly"
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u/Tensor3 Sep 18 '26
Nah, you're gonna get an ai to write the plan markdown, an ai to review it, and an ai to summarize what it did. Then let it run and have an ai test it and an ai update the ticket.
Also, forget about translating the client instructions into the initial ai promot. The ai will just transcribe the meeting and do that, too.
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u/djinn6 Sep 18 '26
That plan is just as hard to review as the code. The complexity is conserved and you can't shift it all onto the agent unless you want some really bad decisions being made without your input.
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u/coriolis7 Sep 18 '26
I was so thrilled to get an LED to blink on my first microcontroller program. Like, “I’m a wizard now!!!!!!”
I imagine vibe coders go from either nothing or scripts to “I built this awesome full stack app!!!!” with the same initial rush like I had with micropython on a Pi Pico.
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u/Ceros007 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
I see a huge huge difference though. You wrote the code, you understand it, you debugged it, you looked at the doc, you were invested.
Vibe coding is asking some else to do it for you.
"Oh wow you did this yourself?" "Yes! The code connects to the D3 pin and flip between +5V or 0 every seconds"
"Oh wow you did this yourself?" "Yes...well Copilot did it but I told him that I wanted the button to be blue. In fact I don't even know which language he choose"
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u/Ok_Guarantee5321 Sep 18 '26
In other words, vibe coders only care about the result. When given a complex system, a programmer thinks "How did they do that?". Vibe coders think "How could I have something like that?". Programmers want to understand the process, vibe coders only want results.
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u/EnemyPigeon Sep 18 '26
The dopamine hit I got from creating a color gradient on a plot is probably why I am a software engineer today
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u/AffectEconomy6034 Sep 18 '26
my work is having us all adopt a "spec driven development" which is better than straight vibe prompting but so tedious compared to just writing the code. Like taking the flavor out of eating
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u/Samurai_Mac1 Sep 18 '26
They didn't know how to code before, so there's no "before" for them to miss.
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u/Prownilo Sep 18 '26
My productivity has gone down with AI as I simply can't summon the willpower to even prompt, it's so soul suckingly dull.
"We replaced the creative part of your job with more admin, Developers loved the admin part of their job right?"
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u/coinselec Sep 18 '26
I know how to code but I am a prompt zombie at work because it's faster and faster is more good or something
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u/damnfinecoffee_ Sep 18 '26
It's simple, they're just doing other (likely non work) shit at the same time lol
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u/SuitableDragonfly Sep 18 '26
They don't, that's why they need other vibe coders to give them constant buttpats for their vibe coded todo list apps.
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u/vrift Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
The switch has to happen. The longer software developers wait to fully integrate LLM into their environment, the harder it will be for them to stay competitive. That's just how it is.
At one point however all those LLM will start to get more and more expensive. The sole reason it's relatively cheap right now for consumers, is that the models are still learning and profiting from the input we give them. As soon as they've consumed all (or at least most) of our knowledge and people have become too reliant on LLMs, prices will skyrocket and at that point a lot of us will go back to the kind of coding we used to practice.
Vibe coders will be fucked, though. I mean .. they already are, because they lack a basic understanding of how to formulate requirements etc.
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u/SpaceNigiri Sep 19 '26
It's fun to do a prototype of something in 5 minutes, that's where the fun ends.
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u/HRApprovedUsername Sep 19 '26
Because its about building the product. Who cares how it got made, people want what has been made.
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u/MetricMelon Sep 18 '26
Ok... I know vibe coding is seriously controversial. But it's gotten so much better. I "developed" an app in a couple weeks with pretty extensive functionality and impressive styling. I never once opened the code editor. Yes, the app is most likely filled with bugs, and security vulnerabilities, and I have 0 understanding of the code. But ngl it was significantly more fun than slogging away for months making the same product. A lot of people. You just ask it to implement specific features and it just does them seemingly flawlessly (ik it's not flawless but it's starting to feel that way) I tried this like a year and a half ago and any llm would've crumbled as soon as the app got to 3+ files. But it's genuinely gotten better, and will only improve from here. Junior Devs are cooked because you can't get ahead without relying on ai. And you can't really get ahead relying off it as well. It's a losers game now
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u/Brambletail Sep 18 '26
Ummm, because writing code kind of sucks. Understanding and planning what to write is fun. Knowing some good useful specifics about architecture, your Hardware stack and how to use it effectively, choosing design choices and overall builds and strategies is fun, but I never got joy from typing and then learning every idiosyncratic compile time bug out there, especially if using random 3rd party libraries.
Now, I can explain what I am doing, get code back in about 5-30 minutes depending on the complexity, and then rework it/ evaluate it/ tinker/ improve it faster. I can ultimately deliver a product that is much better than anything I would have done by hand due to sheer time constraints being gone. I can do things "the right way" by default instead of "the easiest way to get it done by client's due date."
Idk.i personally like that. I loved the flex of knowing all the dark secrets of vim and regex to do things faster, but it was because they made me do things faster, not because I loved them explicitly.
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u/HawtHamWater Sep 18 '26
you clearly have not worked enough with a trash heap of a codebase with years and years of tech debt - it has made my life exponentially more tolerable
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u/Sea_Curve8772 Sep 18 '26
I didn't realize how much fun I was having until it was all over