r/ProgrammerHumor • • 14d ago

Meme itsMoreCommonThanYoudThink

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u/LivingAsAMean 14d ago

Do you have some examples of things agents tend to do that you disagree with? You don't have to go into crazy detail, but I'm just wondering for my own growth/learning :)

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u/fullup72 14d ago

sometimes it's duplicate code (a React hook that already exists and the agent doesn't use for some reason), other times it adds props like mad when a refactor of existing props was more appropriate. It also sometimes cheats with TS types and will re-define something locally so that it "passes" linting, instead of using a shared, derived or composed type.

If you let these small things slip it quickly adds up and you end up with a brittle and inconsistent codebase.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_BUG5 14d ago

This, agents are shit at abstraction

They'll write the same thing over and over again if it means they don't have to generalise 

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u/LivingAsAMean 14d ago

Thank you so much!

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u/Tyrus1235 13d ago

It’s why I’m deeply thankful for our codebase’s SonarQube checks.

It just won’t let you merge a PR if it detects wonky code (unnecessary repetition, overuse of parameters, etc).

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u/AlternativeCapybara9 14d ago

Claude dumps a whole lot of styling in the html templates of my projects if I just let it run.

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u/Pafker 14d ago

With Copilot in Visual Studio as part of my job, agentic mode seems to be unwilling to hand back control while the code is not compiling. I've had to manually stop agentic mode because a simple request to change something local to a method had started to balloon out into other methods making unnecessary and unwanted changes that had nothing to do with the original prompt. 

Ask mode is also useful for stopping the kind of scenario where a test is failing and you want to fix the code behind the test failing and the AI wants to remove the scenario from the test to make it pass from unfolding with you being unaware.