Laughs in Arduino blinky lights and gameboy ASM

Lol

On the other hand, I understand the utility of knowing how to do these things for ourselves. There are a number of “black-box” libraries that were just an absolute mystery to me until I tried implementing them myself and began to see these libraries are usually not complex so much as they are thorough in covering edge cases that 90% of users will never care about.

Yeah, that’s one of my big fears. Not necessarily losing my job to an AI, but AI exacerbating existing bad practices.

When I started my current job, we had one rock star coder responsible for a fairly fiddly piece of our product. He went heads-down for two weeks and churned out pages of densely-written python without comments. It did what it was supposed to do, flawlessly. He left the team shortly afterward to work on a bigger project, and we got word from the higher-ups that we had to support a new feature upstream in that code. And then another. And so on. Nothing’s commented. Everything’s over-optimized. We eventually ended up just cross-compiling the upstream logic and using that in our stack because it was easier than using his impenetrable stuff.

In the end, we had to fix it with menial, boring, aggravating manual work anyway. We got ourselves into that situation without AI, but I could see something like that becoming more prevalent. And that was working code. Imagine getting a SEV, and everyone on the blame list shrugs and says “idk, I had CoPilot do it.”

It would definitely be a shame if these tools caused new developers to bypass fundamental skill development. My only hesitation is the number of developers who should’ve developed those skills and never did before AI. There’s something wrong either with how developers are learning or who is getting into development.

Yeah, this is part of it. There’s maybe the science of programming and also, for lack of a better term, the craft: writing maintainable code, handling a SEV, thinking in terms of uptime, setting things up to be reverted easily, shutting down neurotic code reviewers, testing your code… stuff like that. Universities are good at the science part. Internships, theoretically, handle the rest. This isn’t an AI issue, but I could see AI making this problem a lot worse.

It’s not interesting, there’s no puzzles involved… It’s basically data entry

So? Show me an industry that’s 100% interesting all the time. Artists still have to stretch and gesso their canvases. Rock stars still have to deal with band drama and touring logistics. Directors have to work their budgets and wrangle big egos. Why should software, which is basically using fancy math to tell the dumbest guy in the room exactly what to do, be any different?

There’s this awful idea that everything should be fun and nobody should struggle with anything or be forced to do anything menial. We want to be instant experts without going through the boring or hard stuff. And we’re willing to offload more and more of this onto proprietary black boxes in exchange for… what?

I see cursive writing brought up a lot in these conversations and I don’t think it applies. Firstly, the cognitive load of writing code is higher than writing your letters so they join up. You’re not just making sure you write the letters correctly, you’re also following the syntax rules of the language you’re writing. And while you’re writing, you’re reinforcing those rules in your head. Yes, initially it’s hard and boring.

And yeah, sometimes you get it wrong or forget to capitalize. That is a feature, not a bug. The more you do it, the easier it gets. I spent a couple weeks trying to use CoPilot and at the end I still had to correct its shitty code, which either hallucinated features I wasn’t implementing, or hallucinated syntax rules I wasn’t using. It was like spending a sprint trying to get a subpar intern up to speed. At the end of those two weeks, my manual coding accuracy took a noticeable hit.

I complained to higher-ups and they told me “oh it’s definitely a skill getting the prompt written correctly”, which was patronizing and irritating. Would I rather spend time getting good at asking the proprietary magic thinky box to maybe write good code this time, or would I rather get better at coding?

I mean I’ve spent a lot of time writing regex to automate large sets of changes. Sometimes it can be a bit fiddly to get the regex just so. Like replacing direct field access with > getters where you have to find the field access and change .foo to .getFoo() and the capitalization can take a couple of tries to get just right.

At least you’re learning more about regexes when you do this. Yes, there’s menial bullshit in coding. There’s menial bullshit in every field. Some of it gets abstracted away (syntax highlighting to help with comprehension), some of it gets kicked around and ultimately does not impress (VB’s drag-and-drop coding), and some of it stays because it’s necessary. Nobody likes doing manual stuff, but sometimes it’s preferable to trying to automate it.

Also, I’ve never heard of anyone paying $20 a month for the privilege of not writing in cursive, or being unable to write because they don’t have internet. Something to think about.

Yep. It’s gonna be $20 forever, too. Have fun!

But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom

Get better at it, manually, or you’ll suck at it forever. It’s a skill like anything else.

Here’s a weird one: Pac-Man World. 3Dish platformer with a lot of neat tricks and surprises. It’s not groundbreaking, but it made me genuinely happy when I played it.

Also, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. There’s so much stuff to do in this game, and if you do it right the

and there’s even more stuff to do.

Try thinking about baseball.

There was a senior dev at my first job that we called Lord Voldemort and he was the king of ungreppable variable names. Short, full of common characters, and none of them actually described what they were doing. I swear he only used characters that appeared in C++ keywords, so looking for fo would invariably tag every for statement in the file.

He also had hooks set up to notify when anyone was in his area of the code and you’d always get a two-hour phonecall where he’d slowly wear you down and browbeat you into backing out your changes. Every time I pulled a ticket in his codebase I’d internally shudder. He was friends and/or had dirt on the CTO so he just remained in that role and made everyone’s life hell.

I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it’s nice to know what the libraries you’re calling are doing under the hood.

Have you played the second one? I begged my parents for weeks to rent it. Then I got it and… I can’t even describe it. At one point there’s a platformer puzzle room based on the Three Bears. I played it for a whole weekend because I couldn’t believe how awful it was.

maybe this will work

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linting and unit tests

Lawyers all dragging screenshots of excitebike into court and counting the wheels.

A thing that hallucinates uncompilable code but somehow convinces your boss it’s a necessary tool.

My cousin rented Megaman 2 and I spent at least an hour in awe of the fact that he could get hit more than twice because he had an energy bar. Then he switched weapons and threw a saw blade and I had to go sit down and think about it for a while.

Yeah, I bought one in my 20s.

Holy cow I thought I was the only person that played that. Excellent game.

In a similar vein, Ghost Master. Some of the levels are fiddly but it’s a ton of fun.

Yeah that’s actually funny. Calling it FRAGS is just the icing.

Now that it’s less broken, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk a lot and it feels like edgy shit done correctly. All the big tough guys are actually just weirdos enamored with the sound of their own voice, the ads are ludicrously over the top, it’s bloody, and everyone’s a human being. I haven’t felt gross with any of the content in it so far and it has at least as many strippers as Duke 3D had. I think the loud edgelords keep trying to paint it as free speech vs censorship but it’s really about not making players complicit in whatever infantile world view the director has.

Lol that’s awful. 2009?!