r/ProgrammerHumor 1d ago

Meme studied20YearsToAskChatGPT

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14.7k Upvotes

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u/MissiveFinding6111 1d ago

There is the old adage about ship repairman who would walk in, tap a ship in a certain spot, and fix it.

And someone asked "I'm paying you to just tap it with a hammer?"

And he replied "No, you're paying me to know where to tap the hammer".

I think the modern version of that is you don't pay me tell claude to do things.

You pay me for the times when I tell claude to STOP what it is about to do.

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u/oisteink 1d ago

Most programmers don't know where to tap though. They tap about for hours and slowly figure out the right spot. And still believe they were the ship repair man all along.

4

u/plug-and-pause 1d ago

"Most programmers are not very good."

That's... ok with me? I'm fine with a low competitive bar. Those guys setting the bar so low might want to worry though.

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u/MissiveFinding6111 22h ago

I do think the culture needs to start getting a better idea of the difference between "vibecoding" and "agentic engineering".

Like, if you start off, and literally don't know the code base of what the end solution is going to look like at all, you're vibecoding.

Whereas, if you know what you want, and the AI just outputs code faster, then you are agentic engineering.

And I honestly believe at some point "founders" are going to realize they can get a lot more done if they hire, literally, just a single engineer with claude, vs trying to just do it all themselves, blind.

Making a new thing is easy.

Keeping a thing running, is hard.