• folaht@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 days ago

    I don’t think people here understand that Lauri Kesküll
    is saying famous last words about CEOs, not developers.

    Like what investor needs Lauri Kesküll to run a company when it can be run by just a few developers.
    Why not merge into a larger company and get rid of all the “middle management”?

    I remember seeing that happening once.
    Special meeting, all cries, he got flowers from us though.

  • ozymandias117@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I can certainly understand why one of your libraries was bothering you if you’re merging 250,000 lines of AI generated code in a month.

  • drolex@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    11 days ago

    They’re going to take your job.

    🤓📚🤚🦋 Is this an empathetic message?

    I wonder why everyone hates CEOs

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      You expect those 250k lines to be comprehensible? In my experience they’ll be an utter clusterfuck.

      You can’t fix the airplane if it turns out to be a boat with legs, 2 holes (worked around with 5 pumps) and 3.5 enormous ears tagged “wings”.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 days ago

        You expect those 250k lines to be comprehensible? In my experience they’ll be an utter clusterfuck.

        Even worse is if they’re completely plausible, but there’s a very subtle logic bug in there that is super hard to spot because of just how plausible everything is.

      • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
        0·
        10 days ago

        a boat with legs, 2 holes (worked around with 5 pumps) and 3.5 enormous ears tagged “wings”

          • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
            0·
            10 days ago

            I find the kind of absurd fever-dream images it conjures to be very entertaining. I try to put as many contradictory concepts into various generators to see what it comes up with.

  • Malix@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    10 days ago

    now ask them to maintain the 250k lines, probably fine for rew more commits, but after that? Oh look, they left the company for the next ai-nonsense-startup.

      • Malix@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        10 days ago

        I hate how much I love this reply.

        At the end of the day: IT-man return to monke. Please. Please?

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
        0·
        10 days ago

        You made me wonder how many lines our product contains. Looks to be around 600k total right now. Granted, that’s just the front end. It includes comments, blank lines, and lines that are just brackets and such. Also includes some dev only code. So, far more bloated than the actual code. Excludes code from any external libraries we use though.

        I don’t have an easy way to see how many lines our backend is. A large portion of the files aren’t for our front-end and I don’t feel like figuring it out. Couldn’t even tell you if it’s more or less code than the frontend.

        I’d be extremely worried if someone added or re-wrote 250k lines of code in our code base in one month. We actually have regulations to follow.

  • comfy@lemmy.ml
    0·
    10 days ago

    Programming is one of those skills and industries that is accessible enough that basically anyone can do it, but you will run into trouble later if you’re doing anything serious without learning how to do it well. There are hundreds or thousands of ways to make something work, but if it’s an unmaintainable mess or you don’t even understand how it works, then we end up with our financial institutions running COBOL in 2025. Good luck when regulations change. Have fun when your operating system becomes unsupported and you have to replace the underlying dependencies. Hope your boss doesn’t sue when they have to hire people to rewrite your hackjob.

    And these were all already problems before AI code came onto the scene. We had the programming equivalent of script kiddies, people who would blindly copy and paste code from web searches without even reading the date or the comments saying “this is bad and this is why”. But this probably makes it even easier to do, and possibly harder to spot. Combine this with how many universities don’t even focus on lower-level languages so you get plenty of people who can’t understand how to fix any of the trickier errors in their code. And that’s not to say everyone has to be able to, but it’s a problem when so few are able to. So these programmers are unlikely to know if the code has problems so long as it passes their tests, and unlikely to know how to fix those problems when they become clear.

    Automation tools are good ideas for assisting and detecting possible mistakes. They’re not good at generating that much code. In fact, that amount of code in that amount of time is suspicious, hinting that it’s unlikely to be well-designed, maintainable or efficient.

    • Gumby@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I agree with your main point, although I think your example of COBOL being used to this day in financial institutions is actually the opposite problem. The guys that originally developed that shit were damn good programmers, but they were severely constrained by the available hardware, limitations of the language, etc. So they had to get really clever in order to make these massive, complicated systems work. In my experience, those really old legacy systems tend to be rock solid with near 100% uptime and almost no errors. They’ve never been rewritten because doing so would be a multi-year effort costing millions of dollars, and the end result would be a system that is most likely slower, buggier, and has less functionality.

      TLDR: The old COBOL systems are unmaintainable messes not because of incompetent developers, but because the limitations of the available technology when they were originally developed forced a bunch of really good devs to have to get extremely creative and hacky with their solutions.

      • comfy@lemmy.ml
        0·
        7 days ago

        Good correction, and I definitely didn’t mean to suggest those programmers were unskilled. In their case, and like you said, the maintainability issues were often a result of technical limitations.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 days ago

        Even if the original developers weren’t rock stars, the codebase was feature-complete in the 80s or earlier and they’ve spent the decades since then eliminating nearly every single bug.

        The real issue is that it’s expensive to add new features compared to a modern codebase , and it’s very difficult to find COBOL programmers in 2025.

        Eventually a bank is going to take the gamble and rewrite everything in a modern language, and designed with modern tech in mind. But, it’s going to be a huge gamble. And, I can guarantee you, they’re not going to be vibe-coding it.

  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
    0·
    10 days ago

    I remember being obsessed with code and finishing a bootcamp and feeling unstoppable… but I never got the job. I can still refresh my skills whenever I want, but shit like this makes me wonder why I am always late to the party…

      • Ajen@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        10 days ago

        There are a lot of highly paid software devs who started with no connections or college degree. This might be the hardest time to enter the field as a junior, but it’s definitely not full of nepo babies. You must be thinking of finance/law.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
    0·
    10 days ago

    Translated:

    High-schoolers are even cheaper and easier to exploit than new grads, and if I don’t care if they know nothing as long as they can prop up our crappy app just long enough for me to sell the company, pocket a bunch of cash, get them all fired, and move on to my next scam entrepreneurial venture while preaching to people about being an innovator and a job creator. Maintenance is for whichever sucker ends up holding the shit bag, but who cares? I’ve got mine.

    AI coding is just the latest spin on this age-old practice.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    I am old enough to remember ms frontpage. It could take a 50 line html page and make it 500 lines or more without changing the external appearance. Didn’t make it better.

    And how do you even explain the requirements of somethingvthat took that much code to implement to an AI. The context window is only so big.