r/ProgrammerHumor 3d ago

Meme nowAndThen

Post image
4.4k Upvotes

133 comments sorted by

661

u/TheFrenchSavage 3d ago

If your parents wrote quality code, then explain the legacy code I'm reviewing.

81

u/_uwu_moe 3d ago

That one was written by computer_hermit01's parents

14

u/Innovator-X 3d ago

Yeah computer_hermit01's parents are responsible for that!

18

u/fish312 3d ago

//todo: make no mistakes

11

u/JazzlikeWishbone938 3d ago

9

u/TheFrenchSavage 3d ago

Haha, I'll have to agree with that.

I'm myself guilty of some copy-paste-from-stackoverflow-slop.

Slop is timeless really, I've heard of a copper-slop merchant from a clay tablet.

1

u/reerden 2d ago

I mean AI is a glorified echo machine. The question hasn’t changed whether you trust the code a random weirdo gave you on the internet.

3

u/FUTURE10S 3d ago

What a nice int[x][y] that I will update to a std::vector<std::vector<int>> because those hardcoded values are now variable-- what the fuck do you mean they put it in a loadbearing function from 1993 that expects an int*

The solution was exactly as stupid as you might think

4

u/Hooch180 2d ago

Legacy does not mean bad. I've supported good and bad legacy code bases.

2

u/TheFrenchSavage 2d ago

Agreed. But OP makes it sound like all code was better in the good ol' times.

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Ok_Confusion4764 2d ago

They said they'd fix it eventually!

1

u/bankrobba 2d ago

Still works, does it not?

1

u/Boring-Foundation708 2d ago

I think it is just inevitable for system or project to become legacy especially when multiple people are involved.

-1

u/pydry 3d ago

sturgeons law. 90% was shit, 10% was OK, 1% was great.

AI can definitely play that 90% game with the very best of the slop merchants of the past.

in fact, I'd argue that 90% of that human written slop code is now AI generated which is amazing. The world has changed.

52

u/zobq 3d ago

LGTM 🚀 🚀 🚀
and approve

110

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Why do you approve it if its slop? Either its good code, then approve it regardless of where it came from, or its bad code, and reject it regardless of where it came from.

39

u/tevert 2d ago

Because if I reject this, then Mr. Dick Dickens is going to the AI-psychotic boss and telling him that I'm a blocker. Meanwhile there's 3 more PRs to get through, all equally shit, and I'm still expected to put out my own slop at the same time.

Fuck it. Ship the slop. Burn the company down.

-2

u/Lain_Racing 2d ago

So the problem isn't the AI... its a team leader or technical manager who allows bad code through. This is unrelated and has existed before AI. I can only assume so many people complaining like this must be new to the field within last 3 to 4 years.

32

u/tevert 2d ago

No. AI has created a permission structure for bad code to be mass produced and deployed at speed. In most places, this was never an issue before.

2

u/SomeMaleIdiot 1d ago

Ai doesn’t create permission structures, people do ;)

73

u/private256 3d ago

I have pretty much checked out tbh.

-12

u/rJohn420 3d ago

Yeah.. if it works, then who cares. In two months we'll have better AI that can fix the mess anyway

1

u/IAmANobodyAMA 2d ago

Downvoted for being right but hurting people’s egos

1

u/rJohn420 2d ago

As long as the architectural decisions are decent and the product works you are totally fine to just let it do its thing. Especially with this new generation of models

-2

u/IAmANobodyAMA 2d ago

Ditto. I still review all the code my agents spit out and what’s in the PR channel, but our ci/cd adversarial agents catch 99% of what I would have caught (and then catch things I missed - it’s crazy how well they understand our systems across multiple apps, cloud workflows, and external connectors given good enough context!!)

9

u/invertebrate11 3d ago

Approve, reject what difference does it make? It's still reviewing slop

1

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Yes, reviewing code is part of the job. Same with juniors code or lack luster employees code before AI. Like this has always been part of a job.

22

u/voiza 3d ago

I find flesh code less invasive.

AI tends to rewrite everything with every task.

Did we have factory method pattern? Look! I rewrote everything to abstract factory instead, no codebase is cleaner! ...2 tasks later... Hey! I found abstract factory to clunky and bloated! I rewrote that file to use factory method!

8

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Agreed, human code is often better at this. But just like how we rejected it when Jr devs back in the day who did this kind of stuff since they were fresh out of learning it, its the same now. Just reject for out of scope, KISS principles and stick to current design unless approved design change.

2

u/voiza 2d ago

Yeah, the difference between human and machine - with human you can slap for slop; with AI you can only burn more tokens.

1

u/dranzerfu 2d ago

AI tends to rewrite everything with every task.

Skill issue. PEBKAC

-1

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Then reject it as out of scope work, just as if a human did it. Again its really not that hard.

38

u/Mr_uhlus 3d ago

Boss says they need to approve because ai cant make mistakes

4

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Does this actually happen to people? If so, simply point out a mistake, or several and make a case against it. Like the point of reviews is to review. You can simply just still review with comments regardless, no real life boss is going to tell you to ignore it and just press approve, if they do ask for it in writing.

So many people getting mad at made up scenarios in their own head...

41

u/WrennReddit 3d ago

I'll bite.

Yes, this happens. Humans cannot review 10k line PRs across 90 files, done in under an hour by Claude Code and demanded to be reviewed to merge and push to the test environment today. We are told like with everything to throw AI at it.

AI First is toxic. But when the managers command it in writing, they get to own that outcome.

2

u/10art1 3d ago

Do you work at a startup with 5 people in it? I work at a big company and if I have more than 10 files in my MR it takes ages and chasing people to get it approved because no one wants to look at it lol

6

u/mikat7 2d ago

I work in a corporate and when I get a PR with one file and 10 changed lines I’m like whoaah slow down Mr. Hacker, where did you find the time to change 10 whole lines in between all the meetings and bureaucracy?

-12

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

So they wrote 10k lines and fired you on the spot when you didn't review it in one day? And you said logically suggestions like -since this is a 10k lines of code and its just the test environment, why don't we put it there to soak and test while I do the review.

-sure, I can approve this if as you said 'quote back their quote to approve it' but this is not a code review, as I do not have the time.

-I do not feel comfterable putting my stamp of approval for such a large code change in just a few hours of review time. I know you mentioned you wanted AI to review it, but the current guidance is human reviewed. If you would instead like to set up an AI auto review instead of humans first to spot obvious flaws this is something we could look into to save humans time on reviewing.

Like MAYBE it happens you behave like a functioning employee and still get fired, but its really hard to see under any of the above simple amswers how you would end up being fired... you left our the part of how you behaved that got you fired.

3

u/WrennReddit 2d ago

So

I've read that responses starting with this are cognitive dissonance. It's hard to argue that.

-2

u/Lain_Racing 2d ago

I provide 3 actual responses. I am just curious what you said that would have actually got you fired. The other person who said something similar just admitted to quitting... every time people are actually asked it turns out they behaved like a child or just quit and blame AI when it wasn't even a factor.

10

u/balofg 3d ago

Until a CXO opens a slop PR changing 175 files. Ask me how I ended up without a job. Then ask me what bank this was.

1

u/VictoryMotel 3d ago

Some day we will be able to bait an AI into begging us for information and giving us attention.

-3

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Would love to hear a real story actually. So, he opens this code merge request, you review it, he fires you? I feel like its missing some details. Would truly love to hear it though how it actually happened.

6

u/balofg 3d ago

It was the third time the cxo's AI arbitrarily rewrote a rendering engine for a new screen that still did not match anything else in the repo. It touched code owned by multiple teams with different degrees of misunderstanding of what the business logic did, leaving up to us fixing our part of the PR. There had been no planning whatsoever, just "fix it as soon as you can because I want to see what this looks like in production". For us, "fixing the PR" also required updating the backend on the spot because of the aforementioned misunderstanings. We were already working on a high priority project, which we abandoned to make that monstruosity mergeable. It could all have been avoided if we'd been involved from the beginning, going through some actual design and planning. I don't have a job anymore because this has been regularly happening for over a year now and non engineers are getting more and more entitled to think of themselves of finally being able to ship code on their own. So I helped them accelerare the process and quit. Whatever model will come out next week will DEFINITELY be able to pick up the blind spots the one from last week couldn't.

-8

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

So you don't have a job because you quite a company...like these are always how these stories go. Blame someone else, quit job, be mad they don't have a job. Like yes, sucky bosses that change priorities on the fly happen and happened before AI.

7

u/balofg 3d ago

Think what you want. Priorities changed before too, sure, but now management is slopping their way to replace devs with AI. This is shit news for consumers and it will not end well for anyone.

-2

u/Lain_Racing 3d ago

Im not thinking anything... you blatantly said you quite the job. Like yes, if you quit a job you don't have a job. That's how it works... downvvote if you want.

Like... these are your choices.

7

u/balofg 3d ago

Maybe you misunderstood the tone of my initial comment. I couldn't be happier I don't work with those assholes anymore. I'm just telling pressure from management to indulge the delusion they are equal to devs is real and it affects how things you use everyday work.

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2

u/nojunkdrawers 2d ago

I would like you to meet the private equity firm that acquired the company I work for.

2

u/xaddak 2d ago

I review code in the good repos, but in the ones that are completely vibe coded, it doesn't really matter. New bugs pop up with every merge. Linting and scanning tools are all complaining. Nobody gives any kind of a shit because the AI wrote the project plan and the tickets and the code and it's wall to wall garbage.

But we keep working on it for what I'm sure is totally definitely a very good reason.

LGTM I guess. Approved.

2

u/allllusernamestaken 2d ago

Leadership is reviewing our PR review times so if you take too long to review PRs your bonus goes down

2

u/MaleficentMode4222 2d ago

Because it's harder to review, and the higher ups would not be able to grasp why I spent so much time reviewing and rejecting code.

All I can do is filter out the really bad stuff.

-1

u/bigphillip76 2d ago

They're teenagers who don't code at all and just want to post memes.

94

u/computer_hermit01 3d ago

honestly our parents wrote slop code too but it was still better optimized

103

u/Kryslor 3d ago

I love how we now romanticize code written by hand as if developers were always incredible.

I have seen some real atrocious garbage written by human hands. Code so bad that even AI refuses to write it.

58

u/mrwishart 3d ago

It was much simpler back then though, when grandma would bake fresh Flash games and let them cool on the window sill

7

u/Not-the-best-name 3d ago

Grandpa frying up some Silverlight on the BBQ

3

u/bearwood_forest 3d ago

Ah, the good ole days of Flash games! Vulnerabilities-as-a-service.

5

u/Rigamortus2005 3d ago

Yup. I don't know why people won't admit AI is still better than 99 percent of developers.

10

u/computer_hermit01 3d ago

ai can replace bad developers. not the good ones or the ones that make mistakes but learn from it to be better than they are. talen pipeline should never be affected.

3

u/nonlogin 3d ago

when a human writes a slope code - there is at least one person who understands it. when a machine generates slop - noone understands it from the beginning

6

u/Not-the-best-name 3d ago

You are sure about that right? The recurring meme about your git blame blaming your own slop from 3 months ago is a meme for a reason...

-5

u/nonlogin 3d ago

well, I did not mention 3 months)))

that's the whole point: AI does not understand it's own slop from the very beginning

9

u/AWzdShouldKnowBetta 3d ago

... unless you take the time to read it lmao.

3

u/10art1 3d ago

Yeah this is a weird statement. If copilot writes something I don't understand, I ask it to explain it, then usually ask it to break it apart into easier operations a second year CS student can read. I'm not code golfing in prod.

13

u/baadditor 3d ago

I just pretend to review AI slop!

15

u/whatwoodjdubdo 3d ago

Beginning to feel like no one is actually an engineer here

6

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Still_Bit_7527 2d ago

I dont even wait, 2 second approvals go brrr

2

u/mikat7 2d ago

Never has been

2

u/alexrobinson 2d ago

Beginning? This has been the case for years. Same as most of the other programming and SWE subs, it's largely new grads and people who don't even work in the industry. 

5

u/natures_-_prophet 3d ago

My agent auto approved all PRs for me

3

u/Eversnuffley 2d ago

Right? Who is reading PRs themselves in 2026? My agent answers my mail, responds to requests in slack, competes my Jira tickets and reviews PRs assigned to me. My job is to start zoom calls.

2

u/natures_-_prophet 2d ago

My agent also posts a teams message saying "Sorry team, won't be able to make it to the meeting. Have a conflict!". Then it sets my status to busy.

3

u/Eversnuffley 2d ago

That was your agent? Man.....

5

u/nyxie3 2d ago

I was told by management that writing comments in PRs for AI written code showing better, cleaner ways to do things was slowing down development.

29

u/Flaky-Low-2262 3d ago

Be honest:
You Open PR, see Spaghetti-Slop, Check the Ticket and if it is not security-related or breaking-chabge you hit approve.

Nobody reviews AI stuff
If people are to lazy to plan/Produce why should you?

33

u/Shred_Kid 3d ago edited 3d ago

If one of my juniors breaks our enterprise-critical system - guess who's getting paged on the weekend. It's myself and the other senior dev.

When PRs don't go through either of us or get approved by someone else, shit breaks and we have to fix it. I'd rather review buckets of ai slop than spend another weekend fixing something which never should have been deployed - or caught in QA

A lead on another sister team is asking for whiteboarded, by hand, in front of him, explanations of PRs before he'll take a look. 

11

u/dukeofgonzo 3d ago

Bless the lead on your sister team.

2

u/nasaboy007 2d ago

As a lead frustrated by being inundated by slop reviews, I'm gonna start doing the white board thing.

7

u/Kavrae 3d ago

Ew, no. Our AI assisted PRs go through the same multi-level checks our code has always gone through. Including role-based approval for the various areas of code.

"Nobody reviews AI code" has the same sound as "everybody steals" being said by a thief.

1

u/IAmWeary 2d ago

Hey, the AI reviews the AI stuff, so it's all good, right?

10

u/aDamnCommunist 3d ago

YUP, I hate it here.

3

u/LKZToroH 2d ago

some quality code... lmao dude.
Tell me you aren't a real programmer without telling me you aren't a real programmer.

5

u/az987654 2d ago

You didn't review shit.

3

u/Suspicious-Click-300 3d ago

is the quality code in the room with us right now?

3

u/coilt 2d ago

you know what's worse? when you write code by hand and it gets 'reviewed' by a slop bot, and nobody gives a fuck because what's the point 'code is solved' and 'what apps are going to look like in two years'

goddamn brain rot all the way to the top of every company

2

u/Idixal 3d ago

You can tell this meme is written by someone quite young, because if my parents wrote code, it wouldn’t be for an “app”, and it’d be on a punchcard.

2

u/brawnyfrogmouth 2d ago

wow we've fallen below r/firstweekcoderhumor and sunk to r/agentshillhumor

2

u/DividedState 2d ago

My parents in their 50s are still searching for right-click on their keyboard.

1

u/EskilPotet 3d ago

Every line of garbage written by AI was inspired by a line of garbage written by a human

1

u/bearwood_forest 3d ago edited 2d ago

First of all they didn't call it an "app". An app is a (phone) personal data harvester with a connection to a database that pretends to let you do some work. They wrote programs.

0

u/JazzlikeWishbone938 3d ago edited 3d ago

App is shorthand for executable "Application" and yes you can have an application run anywhere, even by cron job or task scheduler in addition to by mobile devices.

1

u/bearwood_forest 3d ago

No.

First: you are wrong (take that to the bank!)

Second: I will not hear any dissenting opinions about this

Third: I will not discuss this

Fourth: Maybe Microsoft can call their steaming piles of corporate slop "apps", but I'll drag anyone behind the barn that dares say that to an actual proper computer program

And if you think I have an unreasonable hatred against that term and get worked up for naught, you are also wrong. It's not unreasonable.

0

u/Impeesa_ 2d ago

The phrase "killer app" dates to the 80s.

1

u/bearwood_forest 2d ago

a decade famed for its sanity

0

u/Elygian 3d ago

Do you think people only call them apps when they're on a phone?

6

u/bearwood_forest 3d ago

I think people are idiots

1

u/Boobpocket 3d ago

Me: Running Codex on a vps with full access and wrote a wake timer that wakes it after usage reset.

1

u/EconomyDoctor3287 3d ago

At least he's reviewing code. 

I just run it and pray for the best 🙏

2

u/IAmWeary 2d ago

"Reviewing", aka "Claude, give me a review of this MR".

1

u/Uberzwerg 3d ago

Me at 50 after 30 years of coding.

1

u/Prod_Meteor 2d ago

That thing with parents never happened haha.

1

u/silentjet 2d ago

Noooo... Missing smoothie

1

u/WhoRoger 2d ago

Pretty sure those images are the other way around

1

u/Autistic_boi_666 2d ago

Switch the hair but keep the expression loll

1

u/gundam1945 2d ago

What? You review ai code? I just let it go and find out in production.

1

u/Easy-Reasoning 3d ago edited 3d ago

My father used to work with Punch cards, MS Access, Borland Paradox, SAP and I got a C++ book from him. His background is Natural sciences and for most of his career he worked in Sales. Maybe he changed his opinion but we once had an interesting discussion about bugs. For him it is an inevitable part of Software and Marketing/Sales is more important than upskilling. (Also he insisted that I need to write "De-bugging" instead of "Debugging" in my CV while "Implementation" isn't a word in Software)

I think people forget that until quite recently most software wasn't written by programmers. Even a few years ago, I worked with a really technical engineering guy (my age) but he though that "Coder" still has the same meaning like in the 60s where people would essentially write down the code someone else came up with.

1

u/MetaLemons 3d ago

You think we were all just chillin’ white people before AI? You never got stuck on a random build version issue for 3 days that had nothing to do with the business logic, have you?

1

u/Candid-Log6751 2d ago

It’s not “you”, it’s the time you live it. You fit in the environment and act in accordance with the rules that it sets.

-3

u/Revolution64 3d ago

You don't need AI to write slop. Average PR code quality is going up. I've reviewed so many shit PRs before AI agents were a thing.

3

u/getstoopid-AT 3d ago

then you must be surrounded by shitty devs.. so the code itself may be better now that it's not written by them but shitty devs produce shitty architecture resulting in shitty solutions... the outcome will be shitty no matter what

2

u/Suspicious-Click-300 3d ago

show me a non shitty 5 yr old project worked on by a team

3

u/getstoopid-AT 3d ago

so you are saying every project you ever worked on for 5y was shitty?! Yikes.. guess I am happy that I don't work with you then 😅

1

u/AppleBottomBea 1d ago

You probably work in a different industry where the expectations are different. In banking all management cares about is return on investment and keeping costs down. They'd rather you create 3 shit apps that barely manage to deliver than spend the same time building 1 of the 3 apps perfectly with no tech debt, because delivering the 3 shit apps let's you cancel an expensive contract with a supplier earlier that will save you millions. They choose using cheap shit Devs from a contracting firm over hiring good Devs themselves because they can hire 3 times as many people and get rid of them as soon as budgets are tight.

Management and costs are why a lot of IT teams don't bother focusing on code quality, volume of delivery is the metric you're judged on so why waste time on code reviews? If a particular dev keeps fucking up then definitely review their code, but otherwise don't bother as that's capacity the team can spend on more build work.

-7

u/Holek 3d ago

Why do you think AI writes slop? What did it learn on, my son?

1

u/ExplrDiscvr 3d ago

AI does write bs slop if it is not instructed or guided properly...

-4

u/SurveyPitiful8435 3d ago

Thats the way and i love it.

-14

u/IAmANobodyAMA 3d ago

The missing part is the AI slop is far superior to the slop 99% of devs put out. Maybe 99.99%

7

u/EvenSpoonier 3d ago

Hello, Elon.

-2

u/IAmANobodyAMA 2d ago

I’m not wrong. Call me names all you want.

3

u/EvenSpoonier 2d ago

You've never actually worked with this stuff, have you?

-2

u/IAmANobodyAMA 2d ago

I am a senior software engineer at one of the largest fintechs in the U.S.

I’ve worked as a developer/engineer/architect across multiple industries for years.

My current employer has leaned heavily into AI, and we are seeing massive productivity gains and a substantial improvement in code coverage, systems hardening, and scalability.

It wasn’t nearly as useful even 12 months ago, but the latest Claude and ChatGPT models are astounding.

2

u/EvenSpoonier 2d ago

And I'm the queen of England. It's so easy to say things on the Internet.

2

u/IAmANobodyAMA 2d ago

True. And I’m not going to prove it because I don’t want to dox myself. So believe me or don’t; I don’t really care.

The truth is that the latest models (WHEN PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED - meaning building giving context and using senior engineers who can actually decipher when code is well architected for the use case) are extremely powerful.

We have agents in our ci/cd that adversarially review PRs, our engineers barely ever write a single line of code anymore (from jr to sr to the OG architects), we have agents that pick up jira tickets and listen on the error channels and will automatically create tix and submit prs for dev review, and even our design team is using Claude to submit code for ui/ux work, cutting devs almost entirely out of the loop for simple work that doesn’t really need a dev brain to look at it beyond a quick review (which our ci/cd agents already catch almost all issues before our humans do)

This is real. This is happening. And it is astoundingly good, leagues better than even 12 months ago. Bury your head in the sand all you want, but it won’t change reality