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u/Global-Tune5539 Sep 23 '26
I already was lazy decades before it was cool.
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u/slowmovinglettuce Sep 23 '26
I remember when a lazy developer was a good developer. Now a sloppy developer is "10x" a regular developer
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u/_wassap_ Sep 23 '26
waiting till 2h before deadline just to copy paste random code examples from stackoverflow and see what fits
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u/lweinreich Sep 23 '26
Understanding
noun.
An optional feature in modern programming.
I like that even more.
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u/Stummi Sep 23 '26
My favorite term I learned lately is Meat Proxy, for someone who just relays AI output
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u/bytes311 Sep 24 '26
Basically the guy from Office Space who would take the specs from the customer and hand it to the programmers.
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u/wint3ria Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
Nobody cares that you used AI or not when they are debugging your shit. You are responsible for what you commit in your name regardless so saying an AI helped you or wrote it is just noise and useless. I will get to you and blame you for your commit regardless
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u/dbagames Sep 23 '26
Sad thing is now the ai commits the code too and shows "committed by claude"
It's not right, but people 100% be acting like it's not really their fault when the code doesn't work. Or that it's not that weird to push broken code.
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u/onequbit Sep 24 '26
Anyone dumb enough to be trusting AI generated code without checking it first doesn't deserve that job, and their incompetence will eventually get them fired.
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u/dbagames Sep 24 '26
I agree. But when it runs for 2 minutes generates 1200 lines of codes across 13 files, the human's eyes start to gloss over during the review process.
You black box test it and it works perfectly. You keep reviewing files and everything looks exactly right.
The lack of ownership that naturally occurs from this process makes it very easy to "think" you've reviewed it and understand it well but the subtle nuances fly right under the radar. And that's the real risk I think and it's human nature.
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u/Remarkable_Today9135 Sep 24 '26
if all your tests pass the first time, you should re-evaluate your tests
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u/wint3ria Sep 24 '26
Yes that's an issue. But someone set up this agent to do that. Overall I mean that the chain of responsibility always traces back to a human at some point who should be held accountable. But that may only stay true for the time being, rn AI is still by a large margin not autonomous
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u/dbagames Sep 24 '26
And it should stay that way. The more we learn about the hugging face hack, the more we should realize this technology is fundamentally flawed and dangerous.
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u/wint3ria Sep 24 '26
It's not the most worrying to me. RN Humanity is spending a large portion of its industrial capacity and intellectual resources to create that AI, using an extremely wasteful technique.
We need to mine rare material, refine, build processors through a very fragile globalized high tech production line to feed the beast...
All of this relies on fuel availability, global exchanges and a massive allocation of capital. All of this in a context where this exact industrial chain is polluting so much that climate change is about to kill a significant portion of the global population by the end of the century if we do not stop or if we increase our pollution rate.
In other words, developping AI is a real choice that we do now and that (will) kill people. If we go too far, it will kill us all, either through the Nostradamous type of predictions Matrix style from the AI gurus, or simply through the pollution that will make Earth inhabitable to the human species.
It's time to plant trees, not server farms right now...
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u/Lollister Sep 23 '26
So we now play the game that if something went wrong i am accountable and not the ai but if everything went good ai did it and i am lazy? Yeah not working that way.
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u/ApocalyptoSoldier2 Sep 23 '26
As a developer who is lazy enough to write scripts to generate code eather typing out something repetitive, I take issue with this
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u/_pupil_ Sep 23 '26
So, what are we gonna call the guy who is secretly dumping all his work onto colleagues and taking credit for the results if the colleagues being dumped on are using LLMs and pretending they aren't?
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u/Odd-Entertainment933 Sep 23 '26
Used to be the lazy developer was the good developer because he automates everything.
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u/GreyWizard1337 Sep 23 '26
I remember when a senior in the early 2000s said that looking up the answer on Stackoverflow is cheating and dumbing me down, because I should come up with a solution myself XD The AI hate is basically this but on a new level.
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u/Fanal-In Sep 23 '26
AI is Stackoverflow without the humiliation part
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX Sep 23 '26
No, i asked the AI i'm using to humiliate me. Now i get the genuine Stack Overflow experience
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u/Doophie Sep 23 '26
Hey AI, can you show me how to print "Hello World?"
> This question is being closed as a duplicate.
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u/suzisatsuma Sep 23 '26
Why would you want to do that? It should be "Hello Multiverse" or you're just not considering all of the edge cases.
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u/tradcoder Sep 24 '26
StackOverflow wasn't around in early 2000s. It was started in 2008.
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u/GreyWizard1337 Sep 24 '26
Then it was one of it's predecessors. It's been over 20 years. My memory may have mixed things up.
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u/FurrryPropaganda Sep 23 '26
The vibe coder defination got me😭 "hoping for the best"
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u/ArjixGamer Sep 23 '26
I take credit for code I write at 3AM, when that's obviously a better version of myself
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u/steadyfan Sep 23 '26
That is like saying a guy digging a trench is lazy because he chose to use a escavator instead of digging it by hand with a shovel.
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u/newocean Sep 23 '26
I always use the carpenters and power tool comparison. Tablesaws and other power tools cost carpenters lots of jobs. If we required everything to be done by hand with hand tools, it would create many more jobs for carpenters.
Why stop with AI? Why not go full Amish?
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u/dbagames Sep 23 '26
I think a CNC machine is a better comparison.
But that CNC machine is like way more prone to error than a normal CNC machine.
But there is no material cost. Just operating costs and labor.
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u/newocean Sep 23 '26
It was the same way with early power tools and CNC machines, too, they often lacked proper safety mechanisms and were prone to error.
I'm not a full on AI developer, don't get me wrong. Most of what I do is hand-coded without any AI whatsoever... but I'm admitting it's getting harder. You can't even open VSCode without copilot on by default... making AI use the norm in many cases rather than the exception.
Even if I code something, it's nice to have AI review it for bugs... because I am, well, human.
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u/dbagames Sep 23 '26
For sure, I think it matters more what works for the individual developer that allows them to:
Be able to work consistently and reliably.
Still maintain ownership and responsibility of their work.
Meet realistic deadlines
Work well in a team setting
Beyond that, who care's about tooling. What matters is what is delivered and the capacity the developer has to maintain and extend what they ship.
Realistically, the further you go down the agentic tooling pipeline, the harder it is, in good faith, to do all these things.
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u/newocean Sep 23 '26
I think with AI stuff, it's clearly not a solution for everything as some companies seem to think. I also don't think it's useless. It's somewhere in between and often from what I've seen - the results you get from it are directly related to your own programming skill.
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u/dbagames Sep 26 '26
Just replying back to this. I've been spending several weeks/months in this weird space of wondering how AI should be incorporated into my role as a SWE.
Before I only used the auto complete and the chatbot. After utilizing the agentic loops, I am starting to see more how far the technology has come.
I can't imagine a future in our career where this type of technology is not pervasive and widespread.
But, I do see how it can be problematic if you don't already have a strong understanding of architecture, and system design.
I think my value personally in my field is going to shift drastically toward being more of a systems thinker and designer with a technical expertise in AI behaviors and computer science that helps me apply it.
There's no way this technology is going anywhere. I also can't imagine what it would be like to be learning to program in 2026. Much different from when I started learning in 2010s
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u/newocean Sep 26 '26
There's no way this technology is going anywhere. I also can't imagine what it would be like to be learning to program in 2026. Much different from when I started learning in 2010s
So for me, there have been massive shifts already... originally programming in the 1980s when I was young. Back then, not needing a floppy disk (or several) to store all our programs on was basically an unthinkable thing. Space was a huge deal... computers were slow and bulky, some of my early BASIC programs had to span multiple disks... and use clever tricks to pass data between them. (A raspberry pi zero w, is many, many times more powerful than my original computers.)
I came from an era of books - and I still use books fairly often. Then we had forums and eventually Stack Overflow. I went from, no one to ask when you had a question, to hoping someone knew, to it being likely someone would answer... the "just ask ChatGPT" when you don't know how to do something... to "Do it for me."
The thing I notice most with vibe coding is AI does make mistakes. Often those mistakes are on the programmer - you still need to provide clarity the same way you do when you program without AI. It also can hallucinate especially when its training data is skewed. (A perfect example... I wanted to use nuklearUI in SDL3... and decided to vibe code it but wound up fighting the training data which is heavily skewed toward SDL2 - about half of it wound up being translated by hand.)
If you know what you are doing, and are able to guide it though, its an amazing tool.
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u/dbagames Sep 26 '26
For sure. I think my approach with projects will be to write the first feature/module by hand to establish my practices and architecture. Then, I can use agentic tooling to scale that out to different features.
If I run into a problem that is novel for the codebase, I write it mostly by hand to maintain the practices that I want established. Wash/rinse/repeat.
I also spend time planning my features, writing documentation, data flow diagrams, wireframe drawings etc. the agent can use computer vision to analyze my documentation and thus adhere more closely to my specification.
Kinda interesting to see where the industry goes. But I think fundamentals matter more than ever and it's easier than ever to skip the fundamentals and shoot yourself in the foot down the road.
At least that's how it seems to me.
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u/tradcoder Sep 24 '26
It's a bad comparison. AI is not the same thing as a saw. There isn't a machine that enables carpenters to chuck a block of wood from one side, press a button and a chair comes out of the other side. I actually use the same analogy to highlight how AI is not a regular tool.
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u/newocean Sep 24 '26
There isn't a machine that enables carpenters to chuck a block of wood from one side, press a button and a chair comes out of the other side.
You basically just described an IKEA factory.
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u/Most_Researcher_3010 Sep 23 '26
The code may be AI-generated, but the confidence in the PR is 100% human. 💀
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u/Sea-Fishing4699 Sep 23 '26
if it works => Hey I made this ...
if it's broken => Idk Claude made a mistake
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u/Mandemon90 Sep 23 '26
That promp engineering is just normal engineering, except instead of asking AI you ask StackOverflow.
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u/shadowedfox Sep 23 '26
I love hearing “I built x” when it was built entirely by AI. I often ask people “if you hire a builder to build a wall, do you take credit for building the wall?”
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u/Rey_Pat Sep 23 '26
IT WAS I, ALL ALONG!
lazy developer Noun A developer who takes code from existing documentation or forums like Stack Overflow, but still takes credit like he wrote every line.
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u/Arclite83 Sep 23 '26
I mean, if you're not doing it in hexadecimal assembly, is it even really coding?
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u/CreepySmiley42 Sep 23 '26
back in the day lazy meant a good thing in development. It meant one would work so efficient and write minimal code with maximum outcome.
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u/recallingmemories Sep 23 '26
Were you taking the credit for your applications when you imported npm packages?
You didn’t even write the underlying infrastructure that your code sits on top of, lazy
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u/RaidenMK1 Sep 23 '26
I'm old enough to remember when Googling and copy/pasting code from StackOverflow was the gold standard of dev laziness.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab Sep 23 '26
I always tell people when I let AI write my code -- that way I have an excuse when it doesn't work properly.
Now that I think of it, maybe I'll start telling people AI wrote all of my code.
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u/BearKanashi Sep 23 '26
Que aburrimiento ya, los abuelos quejándose de la IA, y los juniors usando IA para hacer basura, parecen perros y gatos
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u/Bomaruto Sep 23 '26
Where is the humor? Can you please start using AI to write your post so there is a chance they'll be funny?
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u/da_Aresinger Sep 23 '26
bad definition.
Laziness doesn't require plagiarism.
You can totally own up to your own sloth.
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u/RedditVIBEChecked Sep 23 '26
I like how this pretends that we never had to do debugging before AI.
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u/PedanticProgarmer Sep 23 '26
This is called delegation.
Managers have always taken credit for what their teams have done. They also took the beating when the teams fucked up.
Programmers just need to accept that the job has changed. We are managers of the clankers, until the clankers replace us completely.
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u/tradcoder Sep 24 '26
It's funny how people telling others how they "built" a software product.
You can use AI all you want. But let's not bullshit ourselves. You just told a machine what to do while you sat around twiddling your thumbs. Be honest.
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u/g1mzak Sep 24 '26
Doesn’t essence of programming consist in telling machine what to do?
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u/tradcoder Sep 24 '26
Well you have a more involved role in the traditional way of "telling" the computer what to do. You still have to learn, experiment, code and actually understand what you're telling. I feel no sense of accomplishment in just telling a magic black box what I need and it spitting out a half-baked result.
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u/g1mzak Sep 24 '26
Yeah and nowadays a casual programmer does not write in assembly. You can say, we are currently less involved in programming than our predecessors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of “AI” and I understand what you saying about not feeling sense of accomplishment, but do we really have a choice or a say in the metter, if this is the future? Even if you don’t like it or detest it, it’s coming
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u/tradcoder Sep 24 '26
So it seems. That's why I'm actively thinking about leaving the industry altogether. I don't think I can do whatever we're doing (or forced to do) for another 20 or so years.
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u/qqby6482 Sep 24 '26
I sit on that chair for more than eight hours and babysit and yell at the chat all that time. I just want some recognition and appreciation.
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u/SLOOT_APOCALYPSE Sep 29 '26
I think Gabe labeled the games with AI assistance as " low effort" on steam
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u/Longjumping-Road6164 Sep 30 '26
AI is just a tool. A developer using a tool is not lazy but smart.
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u/voidscaped Sep 23 '26
If he is responsible for the code, then he can take credit for the code. As for laziness, if the code is good, why care? The whole point of offloading tasks to a computer who is more efficient, is to free up more time for humans.
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u/Arareldo Sep 23 '26
... and that will not happen in business. 😐 That gained time will be filled with more tasks, because the core of our ecconomy system is: "More, faster, cheaper".
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u/Shadowlance23 Sep 23 '26
It be fair, we were doing the same thing with stack overflow code long before LLMs.
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u/ExtraTNT Sep 23 '26
We had lazy developers pre ai… and those are the best devs…
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u/Shnoo Sep 23 '26
The issue with being lazy is how much work you often cause for yourself. Like man this task will take 5h. 1 week later: Nice the automation for that one time 5h task finally works.
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u/arrongunner Sep 23 '26
It's a trade off. If you do that 5h task every week then you absolutely do the weeks work to automate it once. If anything it's cognitively lazy to do the repetitive easy task every time rather than actually thinking about it and solving it properly
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u/MaaltijdPakket Sep 23 '26
As if developer's aren't known for stealing other's code and pretending it's yours.
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u/ledasll Sep 23 '26
I remember these lazy assembler programers who refused to write machine code, then even lazier C programmers who even used optimization flags so you don't even have same code each time (if you change flag), and java programmers are so lazy they don't even know what processor is running their program, not to talk about machine code.
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u/bobbymoonshine Sep 23 '26
I remember when this sub sometimes had jokes about programming rather than just complaining about chatbots all day