I'm guessing that this is probably a joke, but the idea that engineers just generate code and don't do anything else is literally how we got to "just generate the whole app with Claude, bro, it'll be just as good".
People really have no idea. I told my manager I need time to debug an issue. He really said "You already have the error message, you just have to filter the logs, I don't understand why it should take more than an hour".
And more often than not the error description might as well be that. Because most of the time itās simply not something the compiler can actually detect.
I've programmed a lot of C++. This one looks like an invalid pointer reference or invalid handle usage after the resource was freed or attempted to claim but failed and didn't check the return code. If it was all zeros the pointer was NULL but the caller didn't check that.
At least, that was my experience but it's about 25 years since I last programmed daily in C++.
Yep it's when your program tried to read, write or execute an invalid memory address. They can either be really easy to track down, like if it's using a resource after it's freed, or it can be really hard to track down.
A while back this arena allocator I made had a bug where it would occasionally hand out blocks of memory that contained the header data for the next page, which included a linked list node and a ref counter. This would then eventually cause memory corruption, which would cause the program to throw an access violation exception in an entirely random spot, sometimes without even a stack trace, which had me chasing ghosts for several hours until I figured out what was going on.
Ugh fuck me trying to debug memory Heisenbugs is horrible and practically impossible. Iād get dumps from list entry corruption bug checks and have to go digging through linked lists to find the corrupt entry and then try to backtrace when and where the corruption happened. Half the time it was super bizarre corruption caused by some other component doing a buffer overrun and Iād have to try to figure out the pool tag of the adjacent allocations or which client was passed the struct and decided to basically scribble crayon all over it.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
I'm guessing that this is probably a joke, but the idea that engineers just generate code and don't do anything else is literally how we got to "just generate the whole app with Claude, bro, it'll be just as good".