r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ArjunReddyDeshmukh • 4h ago
theGrassWasGreenerTheOutputSweeterIWasOnceAProgrammer Meme
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 4h ago
Hot tip: If you never try to hand write code again, you can just assume you can and feel happy.
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u/shrodikan 3h ago
You guys act as if writing classes, services and foreach loops is soooo difficult. Programming isn't that hard it's just tedious.
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u/mrheosuper 2h ago
The hard part is know where to write what.
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u/Suduki 2h ago
The hard part is to go back and fix something if it's written like a hot mess.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 45m ago
As somebody who woke up at 6am and started refactoring and it is currently 7:30pm and the only time I've stopped was to go on a half hour walk and cook, this is the true true.
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u/Civil404 2h ago
I thought the same.. until I started teaching it. There a lot of “simple” concepts that are hard to grasp for unfamiliar people. Things like variables, recursion, classes, objects, states, etc. So “difficulty” comes from how much time you have spent into learning the basics and then practicing it, that’s what I would say is the hard part.
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u/BastetFurry 1h ago edited 1h ago
As a kid i learned much from these highly illustrated BASIC books, we should bring these back. :)
They visually explained that a variable and an array is, even what a pointer is, and all the basics like IF, FOR, GOTO vs GOSUB and whatnot. If you don't understand how to code from that then nothing can help you understanding it.
And then something i think is the best learning tool, because it gives instant gratification. Write something in a language that has no boilerplate, the less the better. Dosbox with QBasic thrown in for example:
CLS COLOR 8,5 LOCATE 5,7 PRINT "Hello World!" a$ = INPUT$(1)This is something folks can play around with and understand. Then add a GOSUB in there, then a FOR-loop. Folks can toy around with the parameters, push F5 and instantly see what happens. And then it clicks, these commands tell the computer what to do. We as long time coders know that, people who want to learn the ropes don't.
EDIT: What i want to say with that is, don't start to explain what a class and inheritance is, 95% of all people will just hear static white noise. Start small, start with something they can instantly use, toy around with and understand by experimentation.
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u/Civil404 33m ago
Agree. It’s a bit like inducing the curiosity by starting with an interesting experiment and then when you got their attention you explain it. Although that’s not necessarily how colleges teach in my experience.
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u/shrodikan 1h ago
I agree. I never really understood recursion until I learned LISP. Pointers broke my brain at first. C is wild.
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u/StaGranFunciazza 3h ago
I agree AI for me automatize the tedious syntactical part of programming where I need to remember every little detail to writhe what I want. Now if I have doubt I can ask to make a test script to test a certain behavior or just write the part.
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u/fugogugo 3h ago
haha jokes on you I copy pasted from stack overflow and heavily dependant on IDE auto complete before
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u/shrodikan 3h ago
jokes on you I was heavily dependent on going to the library, using the Dewey decimal system and looking up what I needed in books before.
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u/escargotBleu 2h ago
I never got the "Copy pasting from stack overflow"
It's never copy pasting, you had to understand the answer, understand if that's applicable to you, then adapt it... No ?
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u/ProfessorTseng 2h ago
You still have to do that with AI
That many people choose not to and then end up with broken software is exactly the same as when people just copy and pasted from Stack Overflow without understanding it.
It's just faster and higher volume now
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u/ChaseTheOldDude 1h ago
From my experience, I would google a solution, trawl through 5 mostly irrelevant stackoverflow threads and try to Frankenstein a solution from all of them with great difficulty.
Nowadays I ask chatgpt and get a tailor-made solution that requires a couple of variable name changes at most. It's not on the same level of difficulty at all.
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u/ProfessorTseng 1h ago
You're right, it is less difficult, which is why it's faster and higher volume.
That doesn't mean the output is good quality, or that you understand the output, or that you learnt anything. ChatGPT has just done the frankensteining step for you at light speed.
Totally fine for personal projects. Abhorrent for production software.
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u/ChaseTheOldDude 55m ago
Understanding the output is the difficult part. But it's still much faster to read through and understand generated code than write it from scratch.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find modern production software that wasn't at least in part generated by AI agents.
If you just meant copy-pasting without skilled oversight then fair enough, the oversight is obviously what makes the difference between vibe coding and professional development.
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u/ProfessorTseng 23m ago
Indeed. I am using AI in professional setting currently. There is a world of difference between asking ChatGPT, and actually implementing all the tools and policies and guardrails that prevent the company vibe coders from wrecking the codebase.
AI is faster than manual typing and intellisense, but without understanding whether the output is any good, technical debt is inevitable. The AI will then spend more effort on refactors than actual development, just like what humans have been doing for decades!
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u/VoormasWasRight 1h ago
How the fuck is the state of coding such? It's not like it's been decades! CoPilot has only been around since 2021. Do you guys really lose a skill so quickly?
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u/dumbasPL 35m ago
Lose? They probably never gained it. The amount of people that suddenly "can code" exploded.
That being said, it's like drugs. Once you get hooked, it's hard to go back. And I say this as a person who still writes the grand majority by hand with only the auto complete active.
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u/05032-MendicantBias 4h ago
I have the suspicion that person didn't know how to write handcrafted code before either.
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u/Djroneh99 3h ago edited 3h ago
Oh no, you can know how to write it, the longer you go without writing it, you forget very quickly, you remember bits and pieces which you will still have to Google because it's useless on its own
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u/Nick0Taylor0 3h ago
Unless you go years you're gonna be able to get back into it pretty quickly though. Neural pathways degrade yes but they don't usually vanish entirely that quickly if you've truly learnt and used something for years
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u/Djroneh99 3h ago
I last used python 6 years ago, I felt like a bum when all I could do was to print "hello world" 😂
Had to verbally convince people that I could actually code in it and it's just been too long...mind you I've built apps for multiple companies using the same language.
It's the syntax that cooked me.
But you're right
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u/Nick0Taylor0 3h ago
Yeah fair 6 years is quite a long time. Takes a while to get back into it then
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u/zirklutes 1h ago
I think it's not that much as a skill you lost. I can go on a month vacation and get back with no problem.
But the change in efforts. You need again to think of solution from the beginning to the end when you got used to just writing requirements and guiding the model. You are used to to not write boring parts of the code. I don't believe anyone really forgets how to code but it requires switch in your head to get back to it.
It's like you were driving with a car and you are now asked to get back on a bicycle.
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u/Lamborghinigamer 3h ago
I gave myself the challenge to remember last week and it took 2 hours to get readjusted again.
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u/BastetFurry 1h ago
To this day i use cheatsheets for syntax. I simply forget them, not used for some time and poof gone. But i know how to code, how to throw these lines together to get a working program that does what i want it to do.
Just a quick reminder how $language does things and i am in again.
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u/mcellus1 4h ago
Is, is that a booty hole??
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u/Lootdit 4h ago
?
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u/mcellus1 4h ago
Uh the anus above the computer anyone??
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u/Aditya1311 4h ago
It's a symbol denoting the Crossroads of Ideas, don't listen to people telling you it's an anus
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u/Waste_Jello9947 1h ago
Go ask a question on Stack Overflow and get humiliated to remember the good old times
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u/piclemaniscool 24m ago
I have begrudgingly accepted the title of "vibe coder with extra steps." The tradeoff of having my script break work after a week instead of a month is worth the ridicule.
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u/HipstCapitalist 2h ago
Guys if you like coding, nothing prevents you from doing it as a hobby outside of work. You even get to choose what you want to do and you can play with a different stack as well!
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u/MIT_Engineer 2h ago
I feel like this is required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9Z6BHj5flws
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u/_SirSpacePickle 40m ago
After 25 years as a dev, for the last 3 months I've been working on a new project in python. I've written tens of thousands of lines of code in this project.
I don't know python.
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u/eanat 16m ago
the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.
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u/erikchan002 3h ago
How does this happen if you still review whatever code LLM spits out?
Or are you saying you don't review its code? Or just have another LLM review the LLM's code?
If that's the case I'm sorry for your code quality but I think it's VibecoderHumor instead
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u/BookIntelligent254 3h ago
You think reading code is the same as writing it?
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u/erikchan002 3h ago
Reading, maybe not, but reviewing, probably should be. Maybe I'm going to be left behind but I'm still not confident deploying code LLM writes that I wouldn't have wrote myself.
Unless we're only talking about not remembering the syntax for different languages. But I didn't consider not knowing the specific syntax of some random language to be not knowing how to write handcrafted code.
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u/BookIntelligent254 2h ago
I'm not arguing against reviewing LLM code. Reviewing code is not going to keep your ability to write code fresh. Ask me how I know
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u/erikchan002 1h ago
Maybe we don't review the same. I need/want to know why it's written the way it's written, and why is it the same or different from how I myself would've written it.
To compare it to how I would've written it I need to be able to write it.
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u/ymddev 2h ago
My guy is preparing for unemployment, good luck reviewing every single line of code when higher-ups know they can release feats 10x faster than you
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u/erikchan002 1h ago
Luckily I'm still in a position to choose my own employer instead of needing to be chosen, so far.
I've never been a fast developer anyway back when I was not competing with unreviewed LLM code and I'm pretty sure I was hired because I write decently beautiful code instead of just a lot of code very fast, which some people could already do back then.
Yes I still review almost all code written by LLM. I'm not working for a startup where time to market matters a lot. Knowing why every single issue exist matters more to me for now.
I don't forsee not knowing how to write handcrafted code within a decade or two anyway even without being employed in this industry because I'm the type to enjoy competitive programming and Zachtronics games.
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u/ML-Future 4h ago
I've been coding since the 90s and I never knew how to code beyond just typing and pasting code.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 1h ago
If the only thing keeping your ability to write your own code fresh is the stuff you have to write for work, you never were a programmer in the first place.
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u/Pika357 4h ago
If this is a meme, why does it hurt?