When I started development, clever solutions felt impressive.

Complex abstractions, very generic components, fewer lines of code, fancy patterns.

After working on larger projects, I’m starting to appreciate almost the opposite.

Code that is boring.

Code where I can open a file six months later and immediately understand what is happening.

Code another developer can modify without first understanding five layers of abstraction.

Obviously abstraction has its place, but I feel like we sometimes optimize too much for elegance when we should optimize for the person debugging the thing at 2AM.

These days I’d take readable and predictable over clever almost every time.

Has your definition of “good code” changed as you gained experience?

I know how to program in Lua, HTML5, CSS3, A lot of Rust, & I am currently learning how to program in ARMv7 Assembly; but I just might quit programming all together, because I don't think that there is any need for programmers anymore.

Ever since ChatGPT's Co-Founder released a tweet talking about how you don't need to program anymore, just tell ChatGPT to do it all for you in this brand new thing that I call vibe-coding, now you aren't just a worthless programmer, but now you are a product manager, managing the programmers; & this is what I like to compare to Discord Mods, they don't want it to help out the server, but they jsut want it because it gives them a sense of power, & that is what is going on here, people vibe-code because now it gives them a sense of power, & now they are better than all of the programmers because now they don't program, they are a product manager who is above us.

& now that AI & vibe-coding has taken over everything, there really isn't any point in doing so.

I am currently working on a game, & I have hired multiple programmers via in-game currency to help program it for me, & every single one of them vibe-coded it & expected to be paid, (They all got fired).

& every single project that I work on, it's always like.

-- Fixed code, hope this helps

class very_secure_thing
{
user_name = "John Doe"
password = "123456"

}

-- This code is a simple login form for your website

Or something similar to that.

& it's not a matter of if AI can replace programmers, it's only a matter of if people believe that AI can replace programmers, it's kind of like currency, it's just a piece of paper, but everybody believes that it has more value than gold, & as such, it has more value than gold; so now everybody can program, & it's so annoying.

Like my friend "made" an entire custom terminal using JavaScript "All on his own", he doesn't even know what a variable is, (Yes, that is true), & he is saying that he made it, even though he AI generated the entire thing; & that is just one such example.

& now nobody cares for programmers, because now everybody is just hiring vibe-coders for half the price to do all of the work for them, & if the code breaks because of the vibe-coded stuff, then they will just hire more vibe-coders to fix the issue, because people who can't program can't tell the difference between real code & AI generated code; so they will just assume that it's right even when it's not.

& now the hate is extending beyond just not wanting to hire programmers anymore, now people are just hating on programmers as a whole because they are useless, like one time I tried to advertise my Rust, Lua, HTML5, & CSS3 programming services; & then I got hated on because, "Everybody that I have met who knows HTML build exploits", & apparently you can create exploits using HTML, (Which you can't); & people are getting their friends to help spread lies about me being a scammer & stuff, all because I am advertising my programming services, I don't know if they are doing this because it's me, or because programmers are useless now, but it is one of the 2.

& my friend tried to vibe code an entire operating system & got EXTREMELY mad (A lot of cuss words said) at ChatGPT because it didn't do it, like what did you think was going to happen? But vibe-coders don't know any better.

& just within all, nobody needs programming anymore, & I might just quit all-together, because AI is taking over, people are hating on programmers, & this post was just one massive money-grab that started an endless train of hate for programmers, so, please, is it even worth learning how to program anymore, or should I just quit all-together?

& I know for a FACT that vibe-coders are going to flood this post with hate & down-votes, but I could care less, because you can't program & you didn't make it if you vibe-coded it, & that's the end of that, & you are not changing my mind.

Jailbroken ipod gen 2 ios 4.2.1 (i think redsn0w with cydia?) that occasionally crashes springboard. Unsure if that played a part in this

As the title suggests, I’ve had a stopwatch running on that ipod since probably 2011 or so, and miraculously, from last night (130,000 hours) to this morning, it overflowed and froze all time. It currently reads 32 bit integer max in seconds, the hours are frozen at the amount you get from converting 2.147 billion seconds, the date reset to Jan 1st of 1970, and it does not seem to increase. Changing the date resets back to 6 pm on January 1st 1970. Clock still works, but the date doesn’t change at midnight. Pretty much nothing that relies on the local date functions properly, and resetting the stopwatch would probably fix it, but it’s such a cool relic where I don’t want to 😂. Ik 01/01/1970 at midnight is unix epoch, but in my time zone, it should be 6 pm 12/31/1969, and not 6 pm 1970. Very interesting overall and kind of funny. Any insight into what might have caused it would be appreciated.

2.147 billion seconds ago is also a couple days ago in 1958, so I don’t even know how it got to that number. Does it count in milliseconds or something? I’m assuming it froze and didn’t roll over to negative 2 billion because it has no idea how to handle negative time.

Who wants a 60 year old programmer vs a 27 year old? Not everyone is going to be a manager. This is even before AI. I don't understand the long term projection of this field.

He somehow found a way to mention he had two offers already, when I did not ask or care. Called my opening question a classic, solved it too, fast, narrating like a lecturer, pausing to say things like "there's a cuter way but I'll keep it readable for us."

When I pushed a harder follow-up he went "ooh, spicy," and cracked his knuckles. I cannot even begin to explain how much that infuriated me. Then ended the call with good luck with the rest of your candidates. I fucking hate this kid.

Tech Interview Questions

My boss told us on a meeting he doesn't consider programming a valuable thing anymore. We develop an SaaS software and have circa 100 clients. On the last meeting my collegue who barely can write code and have no system approach was praised and rewarded with bonus beacuse of using AI while an other guy who figures almost every feature in our SaaS (and does devops) was told he needed improve. He also use AI just when it is needed and think twice before doing anything. My other collegue who use AI he just prompt some general sentence about feature and upload AI my boss feature description and Claude does the shit it works. And it is enough... Is it the new era of software development? If yes i will quit...

I remember the good old days in the 70s when I was like 20 sitting in C programming classes, learning about pointers *, pass by-reference and addresses &

And reading books written by the God tier dev Dennis and Brian.

I’ve been thinking for quite some time about all this „AI writing all the code“, „too many pull requests to review, just let AI review them“, and „we ship so many features a day“ talk...

I’m a SWE with professional experience (pre-AI-era) and currently in my last year of studying CS. I use AI regularly for coding, but only recently started trying agentic coding. It works, but I honestly don’t really see the benefits when it comes to software quality.

A few years ago, everyone kept saying that lines of code are not a meaningful metric for software quality, and now suddenly people are bragging about how many features they shipped or how much code their agent generated.

I’ve recently been working on a project where I code manually and use AI in chat as usual, and honestly I feel like I wouldn’t be faster using agents. Most of the time, I spend thinking about how to design the solution rather than actually implementing it. The coding itself is usually done pretty quickly once I know what I want to do. And when I write it manually, it is exactly how I planned it, and I know every step in the process and exactly what it’s doing (also in regards to safety critical systems).

So I don’t really get why I should use agents for that. From what I’ve experienced, one prompt can trigger changes across many files, and then you obviously have to review all of that, which can easily throw you out of context. I feel like as a professional engineer, the coding part itself is often already quick, and I would argue that you end up spending a similar amount of time tweaking, fixing, and re-prompting an agent to get to the same level of thoroughness and context-awareness you would have had by doing it manually.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think AI is very useful, especially for debugging, fixing errors, finding documentation, or generating examples quickly. In those areas, it definitely accelerates the process for me. But when it comes to just generating code, I really don’t see that much of a benefit.

Am I the only one who feels this way, or does anyone else think about it like this?

I run a small development company for law firms. Mostly we get orders for automation layers, custom dashboards that sits on their SaaS + some websites.

Since AI the development is faster but code base has gone poor. Recently I needed a frontend dev, we were assigned with a frontend pixel perfect design in react. I hired a dev who said he uses AI to code 10x faster and delivers pixel perfect design to code conversion.

Within a week my CTO had to sit down with the guy pointing out misalignments with APIs, random purple blue gradients at some places and component structure mess. He was creating unique components for elements that could have been reused.

When I asked how he coded this he said he prompted it. I opened a component and asked if he can explain what he wrote - he just couldn't explain his own code.

Out of 100 applicants 99 are those who can't even write 2 lines of code themselves. Causing massive delays and bad code.

Have you guys found a solution to this yet?

I am a 30 year-old quitting translator with a bachelor's degree in English and would like to turn to be a self-taught programmer or get a bachelor's degree in CS from a private university in my country (Thailand). To be honest, I don't have the feeling that AI can replace programmers. Do you guys have the same thought as me or have any different thoughts? Also, Should I get a CS degree?

I'm interested in game development and website development.

Mac system run out of memory

I am a computer science student and was taught both C++ and Java. I was told about Java's "Write once, run anywhere" slogan. If that's the case, why isn't Minecraft's Java edition the one that's shared across platforms? Why is it the C++ one?

Got an offer for MLE e5 at Meta and in the team matching process.
I’ve spoken to many team managers (and for some teams even an Eng on the team) and noticed they are all first gen Chinese. Like literally all of them.
Should I be worried about this? This isn’t something I can talk to the recruiter or manager about.

I’m non Chinese btw

Meta Interview Questions

#meta

I started learning to code in mid 2022 pre AI era purely out of curiosity. I spent more than a year trying out different types of fields and tech stacks. Web development, App Development, JavaScript, Python, C++, Java, and what not. That was me before I knew what were the possibilities.

In 2024, I chose web development. And started building projects for fun. Eventually got an internship in my first semester of college. Next year I got a full time job with a decent salary. Everything happened. So did the AI revolution.

Fast forward to 2026. All I do is add skills, setup MCP servers, prompt, watch AI do my work, review it, and this loop goes on till the end of the day. Because now I've become a condom between claude code and the codebase. I prevent AI from turning it into a slop.

WTF!!!

I entered this field for the sole reason of creating things, but all I do is basically consume what AI is creating for me. And to some extent it feels like scrolling reels/tiktok mindlessly.

I wanted to be a creator but forced to turn into a consumer?

FUCKKKKKKKKKKK!!!

Is it only me, or did you also notice a pattern that the people who promote and act as evangelists of agentic coding, vibe coding, or whatever AI-assisted slop coding you want to call it, are either people who have absolutely no understanding of software engineering or people who last wrote code a decade ago and were mediocre at it even then?

I clearly see the trend and correlation, at least in my LinkedIn feed.

EDIT: This post is NOT about people who use AI as a tool and know what they're doing with it. It is about those who have no clue about software engineering, yet still feel the urge to post about it without having the slightest understanding of the subject.

So as the title suggests a client of mine made this claim that his friend fired 90% of his staff and replaced them with AI. And he told me that i should get more good at getting AI to generate code and if the code is wrong it's the issue of the prompt.

And he also said that he gave the plan of the project (that he gave me) to his AI friend who fired 90% of the staff, and his friend said that it would take him a few hours to make the whole backend with AI and i find it hard to believe. So the 90% guy uses the following AI to do his work which claimed to have fired 90% of his staff because of it:

“I use cursor to write back end code using the sonnet 3.7 thinking model, I use bolt.new for doing the UI, and I use o3 (this superseded o1-pro) for doing architecture, docs, design, and hard problems. The tooling landscape is still a total mess, but those are the best ones I've found while I continue to work on making my own tools that do ai how I think it should be”

and also if this 90% guy did really fire 90% of his staff how complex/simple is the projects that he is doing using those AI?

And also my client made this comment about the 90% guy:

“what this guy is building is 1000X more complicated than the stuff we want to do and he exclusively uses the AI to generate his backend and front end code”

So my fellow programmers who i adore dearly, make your comments!

I have seen multiple projects with people doing sw dev for 10+ years. In most cases the qulity of the code range from horrendous to bad. Usually the code is kind of just one big lump without any kind of structure or design idea. There are global variables in multiple places, functions that take 15+ arguments, with pointers input and out, and updating global state. No documentation. Zero consideration for any useful naming conventions, or consistency in naming or commenting. Literal values everywhere without any explanation. The list goes on. Yet the people working there seems to not find it a problem, and project managers or team leaders are completely oblivious. Are most programmers bad, is this just the inevitable state that any project end up in after some time?

Throwaway account for obvious reasons

I am a student, Ive always been good at programming since I was a kid, Ive seen this thing as my future, I was excited every year getting closer to the dream of being a programmer

Now I am one year before graduation. LLMs do it, I will never write code professionally, the only thing I was exceptionally good at compared to my peers has been devalued hard.

I understand programming knowledge is still important, but not really as before. I dreamt of being in a team and writing code with fellow humans and talking about design or refactoring or whatever, but now that is gone.

The thing that would have gave me lots of value is now as accessible as ever, and it will only get worse.
People say architecture and design is still important, but how much of that is really cope? If AI can write thousands of lines correctly (i know not 100%), it won’t be too long till it masters picking architecutre decisions from a smaller input and output.

Ive been always good at researching, I will debug stuff quickly with what Ive called binary debugging, I will find a solution in stackoverflow very quickly, I enjoyed reading the docs and knowing the smallest details, it all had a very quick ROI. Now AI does that.

I am good at converting requirements to code, at solving problems with code. It used to differ me, you could rely on me to find a solution go make anything possible. AI now does that. I do not want to prompt it to do it for me, but who cares about what I want? There is no value in this anymore

I feel depressed, people told me life is more than this, but I was happy that I would have a huge contribution to society, now that is no longer the case. If AGI comes (i know we are not any close, but just a random remark) and any intelligence or intellect is no longer needed, then idk what ill do.

This is just not what I signed up for, this is not the life ive envisionned, thinks took too fast of a detour

I'm in a real predicament on whether I want to continue with programming or not as a career.

I've been coding for around 10 years. I have recently bowed to the relentless pressure of upper management to use Claude Code to the max and essentially vibe code everything to meet deadlines impossible to meet otherwise.

I'm feel like I'm now the arms of Claude.

This career has never been physical and I was happy with that because at least I was using my brain. Now I don't use my body or my brain.

Are all jobs like this now when it comes to programming?

Essentially, I want to know if I need to look for a new job because I'm not using my skills in this role or whether to abandon the coding career all together because all roles are like this.

When I was learning to code, I understood a lot of concepts in theory, but working on real projects made me look at them completely differently.

For example, things like debugging, database design, API architecture, reading someone else’s code, error handling, and writing maintainable code felt very different once I started working on actual applications.

I’m curious about other developers:

What programming concept or skill finally “clicked” for you after working on real-world projects?

And what do you wish you had learned earlier?

Since more and more people have been deciding to leave software engineering and less people are learning how to code, I think software engineers may actually be better off in the future due to a theory called Jevons paradox. If the amount of people becoming purely vibe coders who do not understand the underlying code increases too exponentially and too fast then a market shift may occur. The software engineers who can both use AI and actually code will be in very high value as they will be able to both audit the AI code for underlying bugs it may have missed, give better prompts for the AI rather than vague prompts like fix this bug, and since more and more people cannot do this, their skills will become very scarce leading to both higher pay job positions as companies are desperate for someone who can actually code. As well as this the software engineers who can do these are potentially able to start successful software businesses that dethatch away from the current generic, AI apps with the same layout and design.

This is the main reason I personally am trying to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Terminal and SQL

Would you agree or do you think it is just going to get worse and worse as AI gets better and better?

I have heard this saying a couple of times and I think it is the stupidest thing ever. It might be just because I have only been coding for 4 years, but I have never thought to myself that someone's code looks cluttered because they explain what every function does in a one or two line description. If anything it makes the code easier to understand in my opinion.

However, I may be wrong. What do other people think, do yall like code with minimal comments, what are the benefits of writing it that way?