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  • steev hisedetritus@todon.eu
    Nov 8, 2026, 6:33 PM

    @knowprose @cwebber

    100% I always felt like, even way before the "AI" "boom" that software engineering has always been like 80% archaeology, at least in my career where i seldom have built stuff from scratch. it's always years of struggle understanding what the old stuff did and endless cursing of the engineers who built it that don't work there any more, and leaving confused comments like #wtf? and "# seems like a stupid way to do it"...

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  • DrYakdryak@mstdn.science
    Nov 8, 2026, 6:56 PM

    @knowprose @detritus @cwebber (speaking of which: do you also feel reverse-engineering bot slop is painful compared to r-e-ing human creations? Or is it a "me" thing?
    I have a part of me that I can't manage to shut off that constantly tries to model what went through the mind of the author, and author-less incoherent code makes that part run in circles in overdrive.)
    [...]

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  • DrYakdryak@mstdn.science
    Nov 8, 2026, 6:58 PM

    @knowprose @detritus @cwebber [...]
    (It only happens while r-e-ing code. Whatching GenAI'd pixel slops doesn't come with pain, that one just feels souless. It's very obvious is the specific way it's overloaded that nobody went through tons of micro decision (let's say: as opposed to an overloaded picture by Mordillo) and it's just random noise crammed into a pictire)

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  • Tanguy ⧓ Herrmanndolanor@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 7:10 PM

    @dryak @knowprose @detritus @cwebber I had to work on a slopped code base, and yeah, I hated it more than working on human code.
    But also, I hated the human who sold this work for 180k€, didn't know how to correctly do anything, so just chatgpt'd happily the whole thing.

    All his coworkers had to fix his mess, then, it was my turn.
    So knowing it was badly designed just because he couldn't give a shit made me angrier at fixing it.

    In general, when I saw bad design in other legacy projects, there was always a good reason behind, and after understanding, then you build empathy and respect for the previous builder.

    I have 0 empathy for scammers and their machine friends.

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  • Crissicrissi@defcon.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 11:09 PM

    @dolanor
    isn't that the point where you just burn it down and write it new from scratch?

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  • David Nashdpnash@c.im
    Nov 8, 2026, 7:06 PM

    @dryak @knowprose @detritus @cwebber Part of the reason my team at my workplace is fairly gen-“AI”-allergic is that about 6 months ago, right as “agentic AI all the time” hype was near its peak, we were handed a pile of vibe code from a 3rd party contractor as a “start” on a major project.

    The bulk of the project was a single 3k line PR that nobody fully understood (certainly not the vibe code authors) and which my team spent about a month cleaning up bad design in (for example, the original version hammered 3rd party APIs so brutally we were getting rate limited almost immediately). Even the team members who like gen-“AI” as coding assistance keep themselves fully in the loop and have refused to adopt the “all agents, all the time” antipattern.

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  • Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏alan@zeroes.ca
    Nov 8, 2026, 11:33 PM

    @knowprose @dpnash @dryak @detritus @cwebber My recollection was that he was successful at something and this was a tangential thing that he came up with. I really wish I could remember what it was exactly; it sounded like he did a great job of specifying it, he just went down the wrong path to get there.

    I suspect he just went back to doing whatever it was he was good at. Let's hope he didn't go for politics.

    Then again, as a politician, he might be a hell of a lot more informed about the limits of Gen-Ai than the rest of them!

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  • Taran Rampersadknowprose@mastodon.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 11:40 PM

    @alan @dpnash @dryak @detritus @cwebber you raise very goid points.

    And as much as I don't like coding with sex toys, I do have to pause and remember I did stupid things too when I was young. Confidently.

    Perhaps even arrogantly.

    And older people did give me grace.

    So maybe I am being too hard.

    I hope he is doing something productive. But it would be good to know.

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  • pancomputanspancomputans@norden.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 7:02 PM

    @detritus @knowprose @cwebber My experience suggests that previous generations of programmers where no less clever but operated under vastly different constraints because of the orders of magnitude less computational power available, a very different ecosystem of vendors, and less powerful tooling.

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  • Mozmoz@fosstodon.org
    Nov 8, 2026, 8:16 PM

    @detritus @knowprose @cwebber A lot of code is written to be thrown away. Not everyone knows that when they're writing it though.

    Code that's useful long term inevitably becomes a nightmare or weird shit done by weird people for weird reasons. Hopefully you still have the weird people round to explain it.

    "why didn't you use the C++23 std::ranges templates?" Same reason I didn't start my current project in Rust... 2005 me: "Rust? What's that?"

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  • Taran Rampersadknowprose@mastodon.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 8:21 PM

    @moz @detritus @cwebber agreed.

    I remember designing and coding one project in the 90s for a fortune 500 company that was mothballed because of a supplier agreement.

    2 years of 80-120 hour work weeks.

    I'd see it many more times. That's the one that stung the most.

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  • Taran Rampersadknowprose@mastodon.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 9:01 PM

    @gaditb @cwebber Yeah, I remember thinking it was some original thought I had back around 2015 as I slogged through some *really terrible code* at one company.

    I mean REALLY terrible.

    So in a meeting I mentioned that I was the Software Archaeologist, and after the meeting the Director of Software Engineering showed me the Wikipedia article and said, "Holy shit, that's a real thing!"

    And I said, "Holy shit, it IS a real thing!"

    🤣

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