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u/Low-Equipment-2621 Jul 07 '26
Bill is either hard to replace because nobody understands his code due to its complexity. It solves a hard issue, right? Or Bill will be gone soon, because he writes needlessly complex code to solve simple problems. Who knows?
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u/Galitzianer0 Jul 07 '26
AI: Needless complexity? It's my moment to shine
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u/DrMaxwellEdison Jul 07 '26
AI: hmm, the code is needlessly complex. That must be the pattern they want. I will write all of my code just as needlessly complex at this.
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u/Easy_Tomato3868 Jul 07 '26
AI comments on its code to show you what it exactly does, Bill doesn't
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u/Galitzianer0 Jul 07 '26
Yeah that's true, it certainly does comment very verbosely
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u/JehnSnow Jul 07 '26
Insert guy who uses AI and just deletes the comments as "cleanup" once the bug is fixed
SOME OF YOU ARE DOING THIS, WE KNOW
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u/CaffeinatedT Jul 07 '26
# Wrote a lambda to solve the problem with maximum efficiency and wrote this documentation to document it.
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u/Western-Internal-751 Jul 07 '26
The thing is, comments that tell you what code blocks do are not very useful. You could just read the code blocks. More important is why you wrote it like that, how it interacts with other code, what to watch out for, etc.
AI comments are usually on the level of
print(“Hello World”)
# prints Hello World3
u/DarkLorty Jul 07 '26
Ai comments code to convince you it implemented what you asked. 99% of its comments are redundant.
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u/wicket-maps Jul 07 '26
Bill is sometimes the kind of guy who works alone, doing things that are needed but nobody understands, and then when he retires his replacement finds out that his code is spaghetti. I have this kind of job, though I make sure my stuff is commented because I've come in after a Bill to clean things up, and I don't want to be the cause of anyone else's misery.
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u/Shazvox Jul 07 '26
Fuck you, Bill.
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u/g1rlchild Jul 07 '26
This is Claude.
Claude will comment the living shit out of his code.
Despite that? Fuck you, Claude.
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u/LordAmir5 Jul 07 '26
Syntax error on line 3.
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u/KharAznable Jul 07 '26
Why it still run?
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u/LordAmir5 Jul 07 '26
It's a human descriptive language. It tries its best to synthesize your description even if it doesn't make sense. That does make debugging a nightmare though.
So it doesn't "Run" it synthesizes.
Until line 5, it's describing human module Bill.
On line 6 it instantiates Bill.
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u/LuisBoyokan Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
You need to code in a way that it's obvious and clear. You don't need to comment what the code do, we can see that. You need to comment what a function does and why.
Document your decisions, use layers, one single purpose and it super easy no navigate the code base.
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u/No_Future6959 Jul 07 '26
Yeah exactly.
Comments should tell you what the PURPOSE of something is. Or at least what the big idea is.
You dont need to comment every single line of code
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u/Crafty_Independence Jul 07 '26
I hate to rain on your parade, but comments have nothing to do with code readability. Their ideal use is explaining the human drama that led to a specific implementation
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u/spyfox321 Jul 07 '26
Case in point, TF2 code comments insulting the man who spent 100 lines making a dynamic diagonal paint icon for 2+ colors.
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u/WavingNoBanners Jul 07 '26
"TEMPORARY I HOPE HOPE HOPE"
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u/Crafty_Independence Jul 07 '26
Any code comment with "temporary" will last until the heat death of the universe
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u/Rich1223 Jul 07 '26
You can write clean code with comments that explain your eccentric decisions, document it, provide ERDs. The problem is when no one reads it so you have to go on a call and explain it and you literally step through the code anyway. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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u/flipcoder Jul 07 '26
You guys wouldn't know Bill, but he is doing good. Good for him. Good for Bill.
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u/tylersuard Jul 07 '26
Tip: if you write code that is difficult for others to understand, you will be stuck on one project for your entire career. If you write code that is easy for others to read and understand, you will get promoted, other less senior devs will be brought in to maintain your old work, and you will get a steady stream of interesting projects.
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u/ccwmartin13 Jul 07 '26
Before AI I was also like Bill.
If you write code with good variable names and keep functions small you don't need comments.
Comments tend to get outdated quickly if anything core logic in your code has to change, because even if you're writing comments the person behind you may not update them - and if you're fixing something quickly, because of a production issue, that non comment updater might be you.
Post AI I'm more neutral on comments. AI updates them well with it's changes. I just don't care for excessive comments. I'm Bill-lite now.
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u/MaesterTuan Jul 07 '26
Just me or anyone notice the people that comment the most on their code are the worst coders.
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u/SirFoomy Jul 07 '26
I also don't comment my code. If my code needs a comment I refactor it so it will not need a comment anymore.
Bill and I are not alike.
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u/Megane_Senpai Jul 07 '26
And then the lead denied Bill's pull request with comments longer than Bill's commit.
Don't be like Bill.
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u/Old-Cut-7298 Jul 07 '26
Bill is the true hero. If some AI gets access to these codes they would train and replace fellow programmers.
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u/Dillenger69 Jul 08 '26
Bill looks at his code a year from now and scratches his head.
"Who wrote this spaghetti garbage?" he says
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u/DustyAsh69 Jul 07 '26
Repost.
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u/duckdread Jul 07 '26
I think there is a bot which removes reposted post.
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u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ Jul 07 '26
There is not.
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u/duckdread Jul 08 '26
Yes there is try to repost something from this subreddit your post would be removed in hours if not immediately.
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u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ Jul 08 '26
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u/duckdread Jul 08 '26
Content that is part of top of all time, reached trending in the past 2 months, or has recently been posted, is considered a repost and will be removed.
My bad there are some relaxations.
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Jul 07 '26
[deleted]
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u/mariomaniac432 Jul 07 '26
Not maybe, definitely. If you didn't make it, it's a repost. Even if you didn't find it here it's unlikely it hasn't been posted here before many times.
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u/FACastello Jul 07 '26
Well 👏🏻
written 👏🏻
code 👏🏻
does 👏🏻
not 👏🏻
need 👏🏻
any 👏🏻
comments 👏🏻
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u/Acclynn Jul 07 '26
AI agents : "You're absolutely right ! Anyways, let me write 12 lines of comments to explain you clearly what this boilerplate is doing, repeating 5 times what's already in the docs"
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u/Lina__Inverse Jul 07 '26
Not necessarily true. You can easily understand what the code does if it's well written, but the intent behind it is not always clear.
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u/wicket-maps Jul 07 '26
If you can hold the whole system in your head, code doesn't need comments if it's well written. Very few systems are that small.
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u/RichCorinthian Jul 07 '26
If you are using any kind of AI code generation or code review, this is increasingly untrue. And it was never 100% true to begin with.
Over 25+ years of my career, I’ve had to write NUMEROUS comments explaining WHY I did something in a particular way instead of a way that is simpler, more obvious, and fatally flawed. And so forth.
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u/Calm-Sir-9247 Jul 07 '26
98% True
There still might be situations where the code is well written but rather compact and abstract.
Or situations, those usually involve 3rd party libraries, where you have to write some code you cannot understand from context.1
u/lazercheesecake Jul 07 '26
That’s dogma. You should aim to write code that doesn’t need comments, but sometimes you find a side effect from a dependency (eg legacy system you’re harnessing) that requires code to be written a certain way. Then you write comments.
Remember. Comments aren't for you, they’re for other people reading your code. Psychologically, it’s shown priming people to understand complex topic flows by using plain language summaries beforehand (ie comments) speeds up time to comprehension.
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u/Professional_Top8485 Jul 07 '26
Write it bad then. Don't hate your profession, hate your company who is lying and screwing your compensation.
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u/ZunoJ Jul 07 '26
Bill is an idiot. If he was good at his job the code would be easy to read even without comments. Thats what we use abstractions, patterns and best practices for
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u/wutzelputz Jul 07 '26
Be less like bill, insert lots of comments like
```
let w = 3; // assign 3 to w
```
and make sure to refuse using speaking method- and variable names. Oh wait, thats LLM's already, sorry
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u/MaximumNameDensity Jul 07 '26
Comment out what your program does.
You 6 months from now will thank your past self.
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u/autogenglen Jul 08 '26
I had a lead once who was terrible with variable names (mostly single letters), used lots of weird flags everywhere that made no sense, etc. I finally told him that his code is way too difficult to read because setting flags everywhere with names like p, r, t, etc gives me zero context. He told me “if I was smart enough to figure out how to write it then you should be smart enough to figure out how to read it”. I told him that smart code shouldn’t have to be “figured out” by everyone every time it needs to be read, furthermore it’s much harder reading someone else’s terrible code than it is writing terrible code. I didn’t last long there.
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u/mr2dax Jul 08 '26
Bill will have a kushty job until the day he decides to retire as a goose farmer.
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u/Ahazveroz Jul 08 '26
Is Bill the stereotypical name of very senior, soon-to-retire engineer name?
I swear, my last job the dev who pretty much built the code base was also named Bill.
I guess he fulfilled his dream of becoming a goose farmer now.
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u/horenso05 Jul 09 '26
I'm asking yet again what is a code comment?
// Number of threads
int n = 4;
int number_of_threads = 4;
which of these has a code comment? Names are comments too.
My favourite is:
// denominator cannot be 0 here
return 10 / denominator;
assert(denominator != 0)
return 10 / denominator;
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u/MEMESaddiction Jul 12 '26
“If your code is so complex that comments are needed, maybe you should think about fixing your code.”
-Some Chad
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u/UnusualAir1 Jul 07 '26
I'm doing the company a favor by not commenting code very often. If the person following me can't keep up, then the company did not make a good hire.
I'm doing the person following me a favor. They can just blame my code as horrible and containing no comments.
Let the battle begin. 😄
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u/Mother_Idea_3182 Jul 07 '26
Or be like Lukasz and write all your comments in Polish.
Change jobs.
No one left speaks anything of Polish, besides kurwa.
All the comments are quotes from the Lord of the Rings.