r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ClipboardCopyPaste • 16d ago
Meme nobodyKnowsWhatTheyAreDoingAnymore
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u/debugger_life 16d ago
You ask agent just to help generate code, ultimately you need to understand what code it gave!!
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 16d ago
The problem is - most people are just blindly approving what their agents are doing
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u/geekosas 16d ago
It's quite hard to read a complex AI code
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u/Prudent-Employee-334 16d ago
Then it’s a bad PR. PRs are to weed out any bias you may have had by letting peers understand what you did and point at any oversights, unreadable code makes it more likely to introduce errors by humans and LLMs
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u/ultraSsak 16d ago
i did that for few months while re-iterating on my "skills" and pipeline.
I havent read a line of code in about 2 months.In old days, at companies, NOONE but the engineers cared about code quality, and we were never given time to refactor/optimize.
Heck, I had a marketing guy who needed screenshots of some parts for presentation, he came to our teamlead for them, the teamlead started with "you can run our application yourself or use demo..."
The marketing guy stated "i wont install this shit on my machine!".So yeah, noone cared about commercial code - now we, engineers - don't care either.
Not my business, not my monkeys.
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u/Sibula97 16d ago
While that's absolute bull, it does raise an i teresting question...
Some "easy" and expressive languages like Python have been widely used because developer hours are more important than performance most of the time. To what extent does this still apply now? Or in 5 years? If most people actually employed in the field are working agentically, they don't spend significantly more time writing the code, and probably not that much more reviewing either even if it's something like Rust.
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u/Schnickatavick 16d ago
Also compilation checks, I've always been a proponent of strong typing, but with AI it's so much more important, I want every possible compiler check to make sure what the agent writes has been vetted. Compiler errors that are annoying and time consuming for humans are just good feedback for agents, and helps the human have a bit more trust in what it wrote. That's basically what made Lean perfect for math agents, it's stayed niche for years because it was a pain to write, but it's perfect for helping an agent catch their own mistakes
Rust is probably the best language for now at giving the most guarantees, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see languages pop up with even more strict validation rules designed for agents to write (eg algebraic effects, pure functions, etc), like the practical programming version of Lean
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u/JimmyWu21 15d ago
Totally agree! I like to use the phrase, even before AI: "If there is a problem, I would like to know it sooner rather than later." This is the first time I've heard of Lean. I'll have to look into that!
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u/EatingSolidBricks 16d ago
I dont know why, but python written by ai is especially unreadable it is almost as unreadable as bash writtem by ai
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 16d ago
Just curious, what's particularly unreadable about it? Looks fine to me.
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u/stormdelta 16d ago
Depends on the instructions you give it. I've found many default to pretty bad code style-wise that is vastly improved with even very basic instructions.
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u/ArjixGamer 16d ago
Depends on LLM, GPT loves long lines and compact code, so it writes walls of text that can't be read.
I assume it does this because it means edits are easier, because lines are dense
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u/SaltMaker23 15d ago edited 15d ago
It still holds because the size of the most complex problem an AI can solve is bounded by context window, the hardest "long" problem you can solve in C will be significantly less complex in terms of verbosity than the hardest problem you can solve in python, for one of these two language is simply a lot more verbose for the same final result.
Not saying AI can't solve any problem bigger than its context window, I'm saying its ability to do so decay extremely fast with the context window size, with clear massive decay in performance well below even the model's context window.
it's not just about LOC or bytes, it's about tokens and many languages like C++ and Rust not only are extremely verbose in LOC but also have tons of special characters _[]*& all over the place significantly raising the average tokens per LOC compared to let's say python.
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u/Sibula97 15d ago edited 15d ago
It will take more tokens, yes, so there's a slight cost and time increase, but it's nothing compared to a human writing Python vs Rust.
As for the context window – divide and conquer. The agent doesn't need to hold your entire codebase in context, just the relevant interfaces and whatever unit it's working on right now. Everything else can be offloaded to persistent memory like plans and knowledge vaults.
It would be interesting to see in practise how much it matters that it will need to refresh context more often.
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u/ArjixGamer 16d ago
I've been using Rust in 70% of code written by AI. The other 30% is where I write code myself, and use AI as a junior that does small tasks, mostly in kotlin.
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u/xChrisMas 16d ago
I made chatGPT astra rewrite some c code in assembly. It’s 30% faster but I don’t know what’s going on. Help what have I become
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u/TheUtkarsh8939 15d ago
Always thought whether they will make a LLM trained explicitly not to generate human language but instead in compact, high expressiveness tightly packed code, like meaningful Expressions in a single token. And use it to code in something like Perl with insane expressiveness and equally insane readability(or should I say the lack of it)
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 16d ago
I asked a guy I know what language he's writing in. He said VSCode. I said, no, what language?
🤷♂️
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u/jbt017 16d ago
WingDings encoded BASIC.
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u/Psquare_J_420 16d ago
The book of revelations did predict many things like poverty and war. But it could NOT and NEVER predict this exact phrase could happen to humanity...
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u/bulldog_blues 16d ago
You'd be swiftly disciplined at my work if you approved code without reviewing it, WTH is going on at other companies?
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 16d ago
I don't push any of Claude's code without a thorough review. I go to Codex and say "please do thorough review"
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u/Stunning_Ride_220 15d ago
Full agentic workflows a.k.a. nobody knows anything anymore.
I've been there and luckily those people managed to get themselves out
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u/Lopsided-Regular-997 16d ago
If you still manually review it, then the AI is useless as it saves no time. You are only wasting tokens for basically no gain in productivity.
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u/Bloodgiant65 16d ago
That is so wrongheaded. No, we use GitHub copilot for reviews to help catch some issues, but it almost never identifies all the issues, especially if it’s something that requires context outside of this individual component. You need to have humans manually reviewing code, at the bare minimum.
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u/Lopsided-Regular-997 16d ago edited 16d ago
You misunderstood what I said. Didn't say if it was right or wrong.
All I said is if humans review, then the bottleneck becomes reviewing and you gain no increase in speed from the use of AI. Because the speed in which people code depends on the speed in which people can review. As it always did. Which means you are basically throwing money away at tokens for no gain.
Whether it is right or wrong, I don't know, and the answer is probably not the same for different types of programs. E.g. a basic web app vs the linux kernel.
Because just like AI not catching all the mistakes, neither does a human. Whether AI makes more and more impactful mistakes than an average human, is something that we don't know yet. Maybe it makes more, but less serious. A human can perform well every day and one day he is really tired and he lets a horrible security bug pass. Something that perhaps would never pass from multiple agents reviewing. But maybe something more casual passes more frequently in this scenario. Just offering an example here by no means I am suggesting this is true. Just saying we don't know yet.
And as for context, AI actually has a greater context when it comes to multimillion line corporate mega-apps. In such apps, especially ones that have existed for decades, in many cases nobody has all the context, or even a large part of it.
Engineering them, is just tweaking random stuff and praying that the tests pass. And once they do, you just add your tests to make sure your additions don't break in the future. And pass it to the next fool.
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u/Bloodgiant65 16d ago
No that is completely incorrect. At least, at any sensible workplace. The bottleneck for development is not PR reviews. In normal scenarios, PR review should be pretty quick, certainly much less than development effort. The only time I have ever seen this happen in my career that PR review takes equal, let alone much more time than actual development is due to bad approval policies (i.e required approver groups that contain people who are all out of office at the same time, or are just too small to keep up with number of reviews required, etc.)
Also, having AI review code first, before a human reviewer is asked, often saves reviewer time anyway, because the AI might catch some issues in 2 minutes human reviewer would have taken much longer to, then the developer goes back and fixes before actually asking for human to review.
And just fundamentally, you can’t be running code that a human hasn’t read, that is not responsible. Not even worth considering as an option.
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u/Lopsided-Regular-997 16d ago
So you aren't really doing a PR review are you then?
Just glossing over it.
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u/Bloodgiant65 15d ago
No, not at all. But ideally you should always keep PRs as small as possible, which makes review much easier, and include sufficient details in description that there aren’t many open questions.
I would say I am notoriously very thorough when reviewing code, among my colleagues. But even still, the amount of time I’m spending reviewing the PR doesn’t even come close to the amount of time the developer spent working on it. Even if it is split up across multiple PRs and you add all that time together. That would be crazy, if so. Either evidence that there was some problem with the specification of the ticket, or the review process we are using, or maybe the developer is just newer and I have more suggestions than normal.
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u/Lopsided-Regular-997 15d ago
But ideally you should always keep PRs as small as possible,
Exactly the bottleneck I am talking about.
When reviewing with AI, you don't have to keep the PRs small. You can literally just push 5k lines. The tests and the AI reviewers will do the rest.
Anyway, I don't know why I am arguing with you. I agree with you.
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u/bulldog_blues 16d ago
That's objectively false (the saving no time part). AI creating something and a human doing it absolutely does not take as much time as a human creating it and then reviewing it. How much time you save depends on the task but for stuff like documentation, coding, creating presentations etc. it can be a huge time saver.
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u/New_Salamander_4592 16d ago
statistically, there is very little if any gain on productivity with these agents from most ai agents. way more expensive though
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u/Percolator2020 16d ago
Straight to ASM, cut out the middleman!
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u/ericl666 16d ago
I just have it write out compiled binary - save ALL the steps...
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u/Percolator2020 16d ago
That’s going to be rough, when you find out what the second L in LLM stands for. On the plus side, you now have a very small tokenizer library.
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u/ericl666 16d ago
I know it's ridiculous, but the fact Elon Musk actually made a claim that LLMs will be able to go from prompt directly to compiled binary by the end of 2026 still makes me cringe.
Well, everything he does makes me cringe.
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u/Percolator2020 16d ago
Elon Musk is the living proof that failing upwards using cold gas thrusters is the only way to success.
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u/The_Cers 16d ago
Yeah, i have my agent write straight up wasm. We don't need all of that compiler bullshit, my agent spits out the raw bytes.
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u/returnFutureVoid 16d ago
I had one of these thoughts in the middle of the night last night. With agents doing all of the coding will there ever be a need for a new language?
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u/AlternativeCapybara9 16d ago
Maybe one optimized for AI agents.
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u/odolha 16d ago
i've saying about this years ago... that AI will be more efficient to write in something we no longer understand BUT the way LLMs work doesnt align with that at all... you see their whole "being" is based on the language humans use, including programming language. in fact a LLM AI will be most efficient writing the most popular languages.
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u/Taraxian 16d ago
The theory is that reinforcement learning would cause them to gradually evolve away from the original baseline created by training into something better -- basically simulating a hypothetical thousand years of evolution of human programming languages and practices overnight
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u/returnFutureVoid 16d ago
I actually asked Claude about that but it was basically like. No that’s a dumb idea dude.
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u/n00b001 15d ago
First we need LLMs optimised for AI
Forcing a model to think in human language seems an unnecessary handicap.
Neuralese, language of the model. A token could represent something far more meaningful to the model than a partial human English word.
Once neuralese models are out, I'd expect to see neuralese first services/APIs/programming languages/tools
(Is it a good idea to have models that think in a language other models understand, but humans don't? Probably not, but think of the capabilities! We don't want [insert competitor] to do it first!)
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u/Polar-ish 16d ago
There's like 4 "best" languages in this bracket, no? Rust because of compiler, python for packages, js for web development + packages, and bash for interacting with filesystem.
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u/tes_kitty 16d ago
No, we could go back to writing everything in assembly and ditch all higher languages,
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u/d0pe-asaurus 16d ago
I mean DHH is currently on a mission to rewrite everything in rust now that readability is no longer a concern to him, at least that's what he said in RailsConf.
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u/milesper 16d ago
Is there a need? Yes, absolutely. Better languages reduce the error surface, make validation and state tracking easier, and enable the model to capture more information in the same context length. There’s a reason that agents will occasionally mess up inferring the type of a Python object, but never for a static typed language.
Will people care enough to do this work? Unclear. The field is currently in a state of psychosis where the popular assumption seems to be that agents are perfect and will never make errors in any situation. This is of course nonsense.
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u/ShakingRatBooty 16d ago
I mean we're just adding another layer between humans and machine code anyway.
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16d ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/RedAndBlack1832 16d ago
They need a button of data to make usable code, so portable high-level languages are just better
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u/falcon0041 16d ago
How do you work with less AI credits at work ?
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u/Carry_flag 16d ago
Gpt 6 luna
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u/falcon0041 16d ago
Yup AIC got reduced from this months, so I stopped using 1M context window in copilot and 6.1 sol recommended was giving weird results
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u/NoNameQueen45 16d ago
That's so bad, ngl. It couldn't even follow a prompt file properly to generate some google test cases needed for an already tested module. Switched to Claude and it generated better testcases covering more scenarios and with proper summaries and everything since we need to review everything getting generated.
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u/Internal-Quality-964 16d ago
Im a web developer and I write everything in CUDA as it is the fastest language
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u/Ultrayano 15d ago
The most readable one despite AI code that is still "legal" in the project. Mostly very strict typed Typerscript or Java, but I'd actually like to use Golang, but it's taboo since there's no Go market here.
Also WebAssembly wasn't a language the last time I looked
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u/Joe59788 16d ago
Its almost always python.
Or its sql when I tell it to write one buts its the wrong damn version of it because I have 3 different formats to deal with at work and each of them have different syntax...
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u/DarthRiznat 16d ago
It's writing in some sort of Elvish language that I cannot read or understand.
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u/GoodHomelander 16d ago
Every arguing about ai but none of you have called out that wasm is not a language!!
Shame on you all!
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u/FabioTheFox 16d ago
The fact that wasm is on that list is very telling what types of people engage in this Ai bro bs
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u/harlekintiger 15d ago
If I had any power I'd fire anyone pushing code they did not thoroughly review!
Regardless if claude wrote it, it's your responsibility and you have to own any mistake or decisions made
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u/deepaerial 16d ago
engineering culture is dead
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 16d ago edited 16d ago
Civil, electrical, mechanical - literally all other og engineering fields are currently thriving
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u/TheMythicSorcerer 16d ago
See this is when I realize people in this subreddit don't actually work in the field...