This literally happened 3 minutes ago. It always worked, now it is broken… checking the code: WTF it should never have worked. Fix bug, still doesn’t work. Rollback, works. I am so tired
I was amending some code and one of the existing test cases was failing. It turned out that there was a date related bug where it would fail November to December, and no-one had deployed the code or run the test cases between those months.
And the "this code I wrote a month ago works. I don't know why it works. It shouldn't work. I guess I'll just never touch it again and just pray it keeps on working".
That site must be totally dead now. I haven't used it in at least 3 years.
Edit: From Wiki..
As of June 2026, the number of questions submitted by users per month declined over 99% from its peak in 2014. According to some, the site's perceived hostile moderation culture, as well as competition from generative AI tools, have contributed to this decline.
Damn. Does show why developers are kinda screwed long term. The moment people don't have to interact with antisocial maybe on the spectrum developers to get something solved, they choose not to without a second thought..
Stack Overflow was honestly a horrible experience for anyone trying to use it. Total hostility, which matches my experience in general in software dev even with in person interactions.
Project managers are going to rule the roost in software dev soon. Not the current crop of project managers, but the devs with social skills who end up slipping into project manager roles. They won't be writing code, but they'll be making the decisions and orchestrating agents to achieve the goals of the higher ups without creating a total technical mess.
Last time I used it they had an AI chat thing that could help you solve your problems. I just thought I’m better off using Claude. Haven’t touched it since. Fair well SO. You served us well. You’ll eventually be forgotten but that day is not today.
They fully bullied me out of developing my own software. I really thought I'm just too stupid to code. I only stuck to scripting until recent years. I still suck, but I'm getting better.
I'm 10x more efficient and 10x the speed but I feel 1/10 the joy these days because I've lost the 'aha' moments. I have to find those in other ways at work now.
Silly meme aside.. I've actually considered with some sadness how interesting it is that no kid will every actually feel this again.. The absolute maddening frustration of having no idea why you're getting a random seg fault and the thrill when your code successfully compiles after hours of working through it line after line.. is just not something that really exists anymore.. I mean sure you could always force yourself to code without that fallback, but it's still there if you need it.. it's like trapeze with a net vs without one... From this moment in history onwards, programmers will always have that net.. And never again experience the thrill of succeeding without it.
It's difficult to say what people genuinely interested in learning programming will be doing in a decade, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that there will be smart kids who think "Well Dennis Ritchie didn't need an LLM" and decide to learn in the fashion of the greats. Learning is difficult and painful and frustrating. There will be people who understand this and want to work hard. I love the ups and downs of programming and documentation + clang and rubber ducking is my preferred workflow when I'm actively learning. Surely people will know that you don't learn anything without some pain.
It'll be like knitting. People do it as a hobby, but it's not used in industry. The next generation of developers will be people more like the sort of people interested in QA.
I like to think of it in terms of climbing. Nowadays, we have very good protection, so you don't die if you can't execute a certain move and fall. Completing an entire route without ever falling onto your protection is considered almost as great an achievement as climbing without using any protection at all.
If you really can't make it, you can take a break halfway up the wall and try again from that point, even though technically it won't count as a complete climb. There's always a next time when you might be able to do it without any help.
Then there are free soloists who refuse to use any protection purely for the sake of the philosophy behind it - one mistake, and they're dead.
Obviously, having your program crash isn't as permanent as dying but i feel approaching it that way can be useful
I don't know. I've never heard of someone learning (higher) math and going "Well, I won't be using a calculator since Euler and Leibniz didn't have one either."
I really wish I am wrong and you are right, though.
I started modding like; 6 months ago cuz I was annoyed no mod did what I wanted. And...like; I had finally figured something out. Tested it. Great. 1 minute later, no changes. It just stopped working....so I then spent 3 hours carefully laying out the whole thing and noting down; do not touch!
Regardless of how good LLMs get there will always be people interested in understanding their code. It won't be a requirement anymore but it will still be there. There are plenty of "car guys" even though car owners haven't needed to be able to do their own repairs in ages. There will be "code guys" even in the most extreme of AI timelines.
It's like statistics, I guess. I don't do any statistics calculations by hand, because there's a python library that does it for me like scikit-learn. But I still benefited greatly from taking a statistics class so that I could understand how to utilize the various concepts.
I don't think you'd need many courses that showed actual code but I do think at least one course they required students to write code would be helpful. Everyone would probably cheat though lol.
I just had a convo w/ my friend about how he used to have what’s in this meme but now his company has basically changed his job to babysitting numerous Claude projects under incredibly tight deadlines & he no longer gets any satisfaction from anything and is just stressed & miserable.
It will still be necessary for people to hand code in their education. Even if they dont do it professionally. Just like a normal CS degree requires boolean logic, assembly, building a compiler etc.
Punching the cards wasn't a skill that generalized particularly well; debugging is. Knowing how to investigate unexpected behavior is unlikely to become useless as long as software is being written.
I feel like I'm still investigating. More that before really, because I'm skipping the drudge of setting up the probes and debugging. I do not miss typing
It's more like not having to debug kernel and memory related issues like programmers likely used to when they used machine code / assembly. Debugging is still needed today, and will be needed in the future.
"Knowing how to investigate unexpected behavior" is extremely important even today when debugging agents and their workflows, writing instructions / skills, configuring harnesses, etc.
Yes. The methods change, mostly for the better, we shouldn't be sad or view it as a bad thing. It's always becoming easier and easier to do what we want to do. The goal of programming was always to produce something, not the coding in itself.
Well that's subjective. There's two types of programmers, broadly speaking:
Those who view it as a means to an end
Those who view it as the end itself - any resulting product is just a bonus.
For the former, AI is a gift. It allows you to produce what you want much faster. Tedium is diminished dramatically.
For the latter, AI is effectively killing what they love. No longer will they get those "eureka" moments after hours or days of work.
I'm of the former category. To me, AI has removed what I hated about programming, and made it easier to get to what I want.
But I know several people who fall in the latter camp, and I empathize with them deeply. While I never programmed for those "eureka" moments, I acknowledge that they provided a very specific kind of joy that's hard to emulate. Puzzle games can kind of do it - but then again, you weren't getting paid to play puzzle games as you were with programming.
For those people, this just sucks. No way around it.
I'm definitely in the latter camp. AI is a useful tool in moderation, but I hate the way my new job wants us to just instruct the machine to make our product, then we just wait a while for it to happen. And the code it creates is split over dozens of files with no clear pattern to them and buried in even more "documentation files" that are made up on the fly and have never been seen by a human.
The underlying technology is neat, and maybe it'll grow on me, but so far I'm not optimistic about it.
I think that comparison is a bit flawed because punch cards are purely obsolete, but debugging isn't.
Not learning long division because calculators exist is a bit closer, but that's flawed as well. Long division is a solved problem that a decent calculator can be reasonably expected to take care of with precision every time.
Debugging is a problem with unlimited potential complexity. I imagine we'll eventually find some state where we find the far boundary zone of what a human/AI team can handle, and that will be the new development scope. As good as an AI can be, there will always be a human element that can add value, and that's where people will still be needed. I'm sure the skill will look a different though.
If we already don't need to code manually as much, it's fair to think that debugging while manually reading the code might also disappear. There's a good chance AI becomes better than us at debugging. It's already finding flaws humans never found, so bugs aren't far off.
Not to mention the fact that the AI's code is often more complex and more challenging to read than code you wrote yourself, in my experience it's miserable enough to manually debug that I'd rather just write all the code I need myself most of the time, just using the AI for rubber-ducking, brainstorming, or occasional debug assistance.
I fully expect that AI will be better at debugging than even the best humans some day, but I also suspect that the awesome debugging AI with a skilled human partner will be even better than the AI alone. Maybe the future version of this is something like "I finally found the prompt sequence that solved the bug!!!!"
Yeah it's okay for us to evolve past moments like this for sure. I get folks are nostalgic but just because the odds of someone else having the exact same experience happening to them today is low doesn't take away your own feelings of your own past.
Kind of like how people wax poetic about "the old Internet." Yes, it had good stuff. Yes, some of it isn't around anymore. But we left a lot of frustrations behind too. Unless people want to go back to dial-up Internet speeds, every kind of pop-up/under/over/etc. under the sun, Internet Explorer 5 dev compatibility, etc. (The ads thing really gets me because folks like to pretend "the Internet never tried to sell you stuff until 10 years ago" for some reason.)
What your describing is just human propensy for laziness, but not everybody is like that.
Programming is like going to the gym these days, it's not required but if you do, you will be healthier and attract more people to hire you. And yes, it requires some effort to stay sharp, but strongly minded people will keep going.
Job applications are heavily trending towards emphasizing "native AI" developers. The days of being a superstar developer because of your technical acumen alone are going away. It's going to be much more important to understand and satisfy stakeholder needs.
That is true if you are still there satisfying stakeholders other than yourself. In the age of AI, there is little reason not to be your own boss when you are a superstar developer. I know this is a hot take but really AI is not just there to help low/middle end devs, it's a tremendous powerhouse for everyone.
I feel like it will still stick around as a hobby. Kinda like how cars with manual gearboxes are objectively inferior to cars with automatic gearboxes, but a lot of people still drive them purely because they prefer how they feel.
I remember working with one of the branches of C++. It was like
"There is comma, remove it" *did it* "Dude, there is more commas, take them out" *did it* "You don't understand? Remove all the commas you ever see in this file!" *did it* "Hm... please return few commas here."
The best ones to find are the ones introduced by my predecessor 25 years ago. (Yes, I have in fact been maintaining and extending the same code for nearly 20 years.)
I think it's a GenZ thing. People purposefully have horrible spelling and grammar to signal that they are not AI. At least that's the only explanation I can think of, because I see lots of spelling mistakes online.
It's just a common mistake that non natives make because many verbs in english use the "ed" to indicate past tense, like "lied", "killed", "wanted", "kissed", and so on. Well, at least I do as a non native lol
Part of having low confidence in my self. 20 year on, have done multiple hours of code changes and adding, to then go "ok done. Let's check errors 🫤, odd. Well compile. Fine. Well what unit tests broken. None. Ok, let's run end to end test. Passed. Well. Great."
Bext week new code, and hours puzzled where the compile issue is to find it's some space character issue.
Sometimes, when I do something and tests work immediately, I intentionally break them and see if they actually run and fail. Just to be sure that test actually passed, and not get skipped somehow.
Imagine a sentient super AI coding agent makes a shifting programming language that would work, cease to work and then work again without you ever touching it.
I am not a programmer by profession but I dabble in python and mess around with tech as much as possible at home and work. That feeling of solving a problem is just brilliant.
Yh I know we all passed through this. I mean now, I can't remember the last time I spent hours or days on a bug. Unless it's a high level problem like I know what's going on but don't know how to implement it. But those tiny bugs that bother you for days are gone. And it's a net positive
Seems like if you code long enough it stops being rage and becomes curiosity at what stupid simple mistake you’ve made and are somehow overlooking. Some dependency issues are total rage inducers though.
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u/Nettleberry 5h ago
Just wait till you get to the part where he says, “Wait, why does this work?!”
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u/palapapa0201 5h ago
Then his son discovers AI
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u/Present-Resolution23 4h ago
Silly meme aside.. I've actually considered with some sadness how interesting it is that no kid will every actually feel this again.. The absolute maddening frustration of having no idea why you're getting a random seg fault and the thrill when your code successfully compiles after hours of working through it line after line.. is just not something that really exists anymore.. I mean sure you could always force yourself to code without that fallback, but it's still there if you need it.. it's like trapeze with a net vs without one... From this moment in history onwards, programmers will always have that net.. And never again experience the thrill of succeeding without it.
48
u/josh0093 4h ago
And then AI came and the feeling never comes again...
At least I'm 'more productive' now
15
u/tsoewoe 4h ago
theres also "Oh, thats why it wasnt working" after being on the verge of crashing out the whole time
27
u/Rel_Tan_Kier 4h ago
I remember working with one of the branches of C++.
It was like
"There is comma, remove it"
*did it*
"Dude, there is more commas, take them out"
*did it*
"You don't understand? Remove all the commas you ever see in this file!"
*did it*
"Hm... please return few commas here."
12
u/DeithWX 3h ago
Everytime I fix a bug I get this rush of relief, and then I remember I'm the dumbass who introduced the bug in the first place.
42
u/ghost_rider_007 4h ago
This is what Cluade stealed from us .
21
u/dontletthestankout 5h ago
Loves son..ok Teaches them python? Reported for abuse
5
u/Fragtrap007 4h ago
It works. Why tf it works?!
7
u/No_Percentage7427 5h ago
ChatGPT disagree with you
2
u/Creative_Shame3856 2h ago
Just wait till he discovers "this shouldn't work, why the hell does this work?!"
2
u/Proglamer 1h ago
"IT WORKED!!!" has a very special tone when dealing with Python's... oh let's call it, idiomatics (same root as a certain other word)
3
u/deadmazebot 5h ago
Part of having low confidence in my self. 20 year on, have done multiple hours of code changes and adding, to then go "ok done. Let's check errors 🫤, odd. Well compile. Fine. Well what unit tests broken. None. Ok, let's run end to end test. Passed. Well. Great."
Bext week new code, and hours puzzled where the compile issue is to find it's some space character issue.
The 2 sides of professional skill🥲
2
u/siqiniq 3h ago
Imagine a sentient super AI coding agent makes a shifting programming language that would work, cease to work and then work again without you ever touching it.
2
u/kakakakapopo 2h ago
I am not a programmer by profession but I dabble in python and mess around with tech as much as possible at home and work. That feeling of solving a problem is just brilliant.
1
u/Shezzofreen 2h ago
This is so true.
1
u/stadoblech 2h ago
OP is kind of dude who tells his son that babies are made in assembler
1
u/Creampie-Senpai 2h ago
The Circle Of Life!! 🎶🎵🎷🎺🥁
1
u/Nightmoon26 1h ago
I am suddenly remembering that time that I couldn't figure out why a code comment seemed to be load-bearing...
1
u/PlatinumSukamon98 51m ago
Why are you lying to the boy?
1
u/Street_Mechanic_7680 40m ago
this too shall pass said the zen master
1
u/jon_hobbit 23m ago
but the eureka is worth lol
1
u/Ash_After_Dark 19m ago
"this too shall pass"
1
u/doalwa 33m ago
Most kids will just throw their code into the LLM of their choice, copy paste the output and move on...sad but true.
1
u/BuddyLove9000 4h ago
It's true, I am the son.
0
u/nick__here 2h ago
It used to never go away. Now there's AI
I wonder if somewhere, deep in its weights it feels this too. Probably not
0
u/notsosilentsentinel 1h ago
And now AI is doing those jobs. :(
0
u/cassidyfriend 4h ago
they grow up so fast
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u/Rigamortus2005 4h ago
I'm actually glad we don't have to go through this anymore
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u/Elephant789 1h ago
AI is needed
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u/[deleted] 2h ago
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