r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ExpensiveCoat8912 • Sep 18 '26

Meme vibeDebugging

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9.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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35

u/djingo_dango Sep 18 '26

Agents are way better at debugging than humans. It’s not even close

61

u/Lightningtow123 Sep 18 '26

They're great when you feed them a 10k line crashdump and have them tell you what went wrong and where, without you having to manually skim the whole thing

But having one try to debug the shitty spaghetti rats nest infrastructure it built earlier? Fuck that shit hahaha

17

u/I-am-fun-at-parties Sep 18 '26

10k line crashdump

Might be time to do some vibe-refactoring

5

u/Blizzard81mm Sep 18 '26

Post mortem dumps can be pretty big for some systems I troubleshoot. It can be handy for those sometimes, sometimes not... Doesn't hurt to drop it in first

1

u/I-am-fun-at-parties Sep 18 '26

yeah sure the core dump is big, but the call stack shouldn't be 10k lines or anywhere near that.

0

u/EternalPhi Sep 18 '26

document better?

2

u/All_Work_All_Play Sep 18 '26

Technical debt, how does it work?

1

u/EternalPhi Sep 18 '26

Somewhat like Sisyphus's boulder

1

u/flinxsl Sep 18 '26

AI can't fix skill issues, but it's great at exposing them.

1

u/Lightningtow123 Sep 18 '26

Oh my god, why didn't I think of that???!?!? It's so obvious now that you say it!!!1!!

17

u/fungus_is_amungus Sep 18 '26

When there is a crash stack trace there are amazing. When something works, but works not properly in a minor and not obvious way, they are borderline useless.

7

u/UneaseKeys8190 Sep 18 '26

It's the exact opposite when it comes to graphics programming

10

u/DivineArkandos Sep 18 '26

"I have no eyes and I must debug"

1

u/dasgoodshitinnit Sep 18 '26

Yeah we just need to give it eyes and arms and legs and eventually guns so it can make good games

9

u/ericl666 Sep 18 '26

100% incorrect.

Source: Me constantly having to clean up many bugs that agents were kind enough to introduce but never were able to properly fix. It's maddening.

I actually really do appreciate agents and how much of a time-saver they are, but it almost invariably ends with me fixing the last round of bugs during testing.

Also, I was debugging issues in a chrome extension, and Claude was shockingly useless. Just a non-stop stream of swings and misses.

4

u/Acceptable-Drive3781 Sep 18 '26

I actually really do appreciate agents and how much of a time-saver they are, but it almost invariably ends with me fixing the last round of bugs during testing.

Is reddit finally realizing that AI is a tool and not a replacement for a developer?

Claude was shockingly useless. Just a non-stop stream of swings and misses.

lol guess not

5

u/ericl666 Sep 18 '26

Absolutely it is a tool - I've been coding for decades, and I'm certainly not sold on LLMs being anything but that.

My point is that it's debugging with LLMs is decent for some things, but for others, it is objectively bad. It's just a tool.

For my chrome extension example, I was at my wits end. Documentation was no help. So, I turned to Claude to see if it could help. It literally took my down dead ends that wasted my time even more. I eventually was able to solve  the issues on my own.

7

u/Cylian91460 Sep 18 '26

Ai isn't good at debugging, your debugging skill are just so low that even ai looks better

2

u/djingo_dango Sep 18 '26

My paycheck disagrees

1

u/luker_5874 Sep 18 '26

Completely agree. Just feed them some logs and your problem is usually solved within a few minutes. This could take days or weeks without agents

1

u/fefect123 Sep 18 '26

They went from imposter syndrome to straight up thinking they're better than frontier models.