I love coding and learning new languages. I'd rather move to another industry than reviewing vibe coded crap all day long.

We need to build a culture that values process and making beautiful things for their own sake, not simply Pile Dollars Higher, which is killing the planet and making us all miserable.

Right there with you. I suck at it but I still find the pursuit worthwhile!

This crap is brought to you by the people who are positively baffled that someone would want to learn to make music, and enjoy the process, instead of just have it generated so they can hit "publish" and supposedly be making money off of it with zero real effort besides "having an idea."

I also do. One unique important thing that agents rob you of is time with your code - you don't get to craft it so you remember just as well as you would have if you copied answers for a test.

I too enjoy actually writing code. I feel fortunate that I was able to make a career out of something I enjoy so much. I am not sure that most people had that experience. Alas, it seems like the industry is paying me to set up guardrails and supervise AI agents. I am not sure how long this will last, but at least I know that I will always be able to enjoy programming as a hobby if nothing else.

Reject their web development culture and make your own sites that run smoothly on devices using a fraction of the bandwidth theirs do.

I had the same problem with translating back in the day. I really liked tackling a text in a foreign language. In the end all the pros of computer-aided translation boiled down to lining the pockets of translation agencies with even more money while paying translators peanuts.

Of course many people like it. It's literally a highly addictive loop. But when you are a senior developer on a team, it's kind of a waste of resources for most projects. Writing code is not the hard part.

I never got round to doing it properly. Just simple stuff, but i get a little braingasm when it finally does what I want it to and I kind of understand why.

Made a simple game last time, following tutorials and trying to stitch others code to cobble together roughly what im trying to do. Tested a new feature by having it change colour when you hit the object at certain angles. I forget what it was supposed to do, that was just to test the concept works.

My wife couldn't understand why I was jumping around the room shouting WOOOOO when it actually did it.

~25 years here and I started getting bored about 15 years ago.

I'm about the same vintage as you I think (50 this year), programming since my pre-teens and I still enjoy it, although I long ago strayed away from "pure" programming - I work almost exclusively in the embedded space where I design the hardware and firmware, including the HDL. If I were making applications or doing anything web based I'd have been bored a long, long time ago.

literally seen an agent do a: "oh now the tests aren't passing" deletes all tests in the file

Or my Claude favorite, “oh you’re right? I did blow past that restraint and did something I was not supposed to, sooooorrrrreyyyyy”

assert(true);

assert(true);

assert(true);

assert(true);

assert(true);

Or just disable limiting rules because they don’t wanna fuck with them. That one is my favorite to try to fight in PRs

There is a 0% chance he wrote all those tests himself anyway

Never ask a vibe coder about their code's performance.

It's not his tests. It's the ai writing tests.

I never understand why you wouldn't want to read the code. I prevent a massive amount of correct slop by just skimming. The LLM will 10 times out of 10 never ask "this code will be a massive duplication of exact same behavior, do you want to refractor it?" because it's trained to finish a task without asking if possible.

Uncle Bob now writes code for his tests instead of tests for his code. I know it's TDD but it always seemed backwards to me.

Unit tests for logic, integration tests for outside apis, e2e for features is the sweet spot IMO.

Or a rug pull, or in this case the bubble popping.

But if the ai writes the tests and you don't read them, how would you know if that's 100 lines of assertTrue(true) ?

So, "red, green, refactor" has become "red, green, deploy"?

That's a change, for sure, but I wouldn't call it an evolution.

You could also have it write your tests first from the requirements and use red green tdd as you write.

Yeah,his avatar looks like evil Stephen King

The D Language Foundation tried to incorporate LLMs in the unittests, and they created something akin to assert(5 + (funcToTest(846) * 0) == 5) early on, now they want to use it to rewrite the standard library from scratch, because "it has become better since".

That doesn't follow. What I think you mean is that by defining the constraints so rigorously, you've basically solved the problem yourself. But that's exactly the point. The LLM isn't the problem solver, it's the execution engine that does the wiring-up and the ticking of boxes. The easy part, arguably, sure. But still considerable effort that can be saved, and that effort may be better spent on the problem-solving + constraint-defining stage.

Mandatory disclaimer that this is not a pro-AI post. I also don't agree that this setup works, anyway. It's a classic Bob Martinism, the idea that writing good enough specifications makes the implementation irrelevant; it's the type of idea that is allergic to reality

I'm currently investing in "clean architecture". I think it's pretty good.

Not to be too flippant, but:

Boomers gonna boom.

They literally can't help themselves, they're egomaniacal narcissists.

The rare ones that aren't that way can truly be awesome sources of perspective... but goddamnit so many of them are completely insufferable man-babies.

Makes me remember the joke of the failure of the Soviet bordello, they just didn't understand why, they got the most experienced girls there were to find!

Sadly, it's the time "saved" the majority are after. No Imposter Syndrome necessary; they know they're dogshit and everyone else does, too.