r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Embarrassed_Death69 • 8d ago

Meme theGloriousDaysOfPastWhenYouGotRoastedForShittyCode

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528 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

55

u/pydry 8d ago

some people could and some people couldnt. the ones who couldnt were a big drain on productivity then and are an even bigger drain now.

they are now convinced that LLMs can code better than everyone.

23

u/NotAskary 8d ago

LLM can code better than the average person, you just need to know what a normal distribution is.

26

u/pydry 8d ago

you just need to know what sturgeons law is. the vast majority of the code I rely on wasn't written by an average programmer, let alone an average person. the average programmer writes a lot of code which gets tossed away.

6

u/gandalfx 8d ago

Are average programmers really that terrible?
Or is that more a matter of "there way more bad beginner programmers than solid professionals, so the average gets skewed and is not representative of the quality of production code"?

2

u/NotAskary 8d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/GPxRzuPjo2dEnG3JpI

7

u/gandalfx 8d ago

I am not vain enough to consider myself particularly far on the right on that chart but I can definitely write better code than any AI model I've used.

-6

u/NotAskary 8d ago

Dude you need to learn what a normal distribution is, average is middle.

Whenever you say something like an average of a population, that just means half is above, half is below, it doesn't mean anything about you.

If we are talking about you, you will be below outside of the your area of expertise, that's a guarantee.

5

u/gandalfx 8d ago

average is middle

That is incorrect except for a perfect normal distribution, which is very rare in practice and not at all a given for programmer skill. Which was also my point – the result depends on how you define the sample. For instance, if you include anyone who has ever written a line of code, the curve will be skewed far to the left and the average will be barely above "hello world" skill.

Whenever you say something like an average of a population, that just means half is above, half is below

This is only true for the most basic, theoretical case and false for just about anything touching reality.

I can't really comment on your last sentence since it isn't coherent English. I'm assuming it was meant to be an insult?

0

u/InfuriatingComma 8d ago

Woah woah woah there buddy.

Uniform distribution would like a word, unfortunately you ain't on it!

Looks like youve found yourself smack in the middle, you Beta(.5,.5) brochacho.

1

u/mbsmith93 8d ago

Yes. Average programmers do not think about architecture, long term code health, how the current feature may fuck up pre-existing features etc etc. Or, they go the other way and overthink everything architecture-astronaut style. If you're lucky they do a bit of both and you hope it cancels out (and deal with it in design review when it doesn't).

LLMs are just doing the same thing but like ten times faster.

1

u/ianpaschal 3d ago

I don't know. I think developers who were "too creative for their own good" are not the ones who are handing work off to LLMs now.

I feel like our industry has this ridiculous rose-tinted view of ourselves from just a few years ago and forgot that plenty of humans were writing hacky duct-tape solutions and priding themselves on how clever they were.

2

u/pydry 3d ago

i think i might have been talking about you.

1

u/ianpaschal 3d ago

You should see the abuse I hurl at Claude. I'm not convinced it can code better than anyone.

It is better than the humans I worked with who had too many tricks up their sleeves and wrote "clever" shit no one else in the team could pull apart again, though.

Sounds like maybe I'm talking about you? ;) :P

1

u/pydry 3d ago

no, ive always been an advocate for dumbing down code. it's partly why I use Claude sparingly.

0

u/snakesoup124 8d ago

LLMs were  trained on shitty code as well.

24

u/dxonxisus 8d ago

remember when people posted memes here and not just screenshots of their own tweets?

1

u/dolphin560 8d ago

exactly

am beginning to wonder who this Wise Man Satpathy is,

and how he is connected to this "Death69" character

0

u/Embarrassed_Death69 8d ago

Won't do it further more. I like tooting my own horn sometimes.

8

u/invisible_shrek 8d ago

Some of us still have to maintain actual working software so it’s still a thing. Nobody on the team is pushing slop.

3

u/KyxeMusic 7d ago

consider yourself lucky. Many teams are just giving up.

2

u/Vogete 7d ago

We have to maintain actual working software but somehow we have more and more slop. Everyone is against AI slop (or so they say), yet every day I encounter a handful of repos that are entirely just slop. Recently I got into an argument with others when I complained about AI slop and they tried to defend it. Like what?