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Uncle Bob becoming even worse: (europe.pub)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 41 points 3 months ago (8 children)

None of this actually proves that they aren't writing slop. It just proves that the slop that they've written passes your tests.

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Never ask a vibe coder about their code's performance.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I mean, screw performance. You can get away with a lot of shitty performance and still have a completely functional application. However, the kind of slop that happens around module boundaries that turns your codebase into a giant pile of workarounds and hacks really sucks.

    And AI is particularly bad at this, as AI almost always prefers to work around a problem or do everything it can to meet the plan the user approved, even if that plan meets reality, it has problems. Which tends to lead to cascading misalignment with intentions and cascading infrastructure and architectural technical debt.

    All of which culminate in less stable software, lower likelihood of long-term support of that software, and worse performance.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I never understand why you wouldn't want to read the code. I prevent a massive amount of correct slop by just skimming. The LLM will 10 times out of 10 never ask "this code will be a massive duplication of exact same behavior, do you want to refractor it?" because it's trained to finish a task without asking if possible.

    Uncle Bob now writes code for his tests instead of tests for his code. I know it's TDD but it always seemed backwards to me.

    Unit tests for logic, integration tests for outside apis, e2e for features is the sweet spot IMO.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Claude and most other of the top coding agents will check the codebase for existing patterns and functionality specifically so it doesn’t duplicate behaviours etc. Have you used any of them recently? That’s one of the first things it does before even writing a line of code.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I use Claude/Codex, if it finds a thingy that's reusable it'll use it but it'll never create it or ask if it should be created in my experience. I find that it doesn't create new components but just replicates the existing one.

    Within same file is a different story though, it does write helper functions to share logic which is proper.

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