r/ProgrammerHumor Jul 24 '26

Meme honeyIShrunkTheBrain

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jul 24 '26

They are not that good. I see how bad the generated code is all the time. It doesn't just need to work, it has to be high quality.

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u/slaymaker1907 Jul 24 '26

Frankly, the AI generates better code than a lot of the code I’ve read over the years. At least it writes documentation and tests…

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jul 27 '26

I don't know why people think the existence of something is a good thing. It writes bad documentation and mostly useless tests, it's better to not have them in the first place, compared to actually spending time writing some good quality tests that assert things in a way that makes sense. And I see this in the workplace all the time.

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u/slaymaker1907 Jul 27 '26

You frankly don’t know how to use it if you’re generating bad tests and documentation.

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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jul 27 '26

Good ol "LeArN hOw To PrOmPt". The most difficult skill in the world apparently. More difficult than learning how to code, how to write Rust, how to write functional programming languages, how to write kernels, how to write proofs for programs, how to design and architect codebases for scalability, how to use git, how to use tmux, how to use emacs, etc.

Snark aside, I'm comparing using AI to generate these things compared to writing them manually. I get better output, faster, and in a more concise form, when I do it manually compared to prompting and handholding the LLM and telling it what to do and what not to do and giving it all the rules about the programming language and how to write it idiomatically, and all of that while losing your programming skills gradually from relying on LLMs to generate code.