So he does more work so he can do less work? Am I reading that right?
That’s how I read it.
But “the industry” is also telling us, we should be using AI to write all of our test code. So why is this guy writing anything at all?
“I use a hammer”
“Well, I use a device that applies an enormous amount of pressure constrained to a very particular point in space”
“How much does your device cost?”
“$200/mo and the company loses money every time I swing it. You?”
“$12 and I’ve had this thing for 20 years.”
I don’t know what those first two sentences are doing. This kind of thing is exactly what mesmerized young me and puts wise me off.
One thing worse than appealing to authority is appealing to your own authority.
Those two sentences just prove that the whole thing is made up. If he started coding in the 60s, he’d have to be over 80 now.
Born in 1952: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Martin
It says there that he joined the industry when he was 17, which means after December 1969. So by late 60s he really means the 70s.
He could’ve been coding as hobby before it I suppose.
Those sentences prove nothing of the sort. And you really have no reason to get that arithmetic so wrong. And you could have looked it up instead of guessing. He has a Wikipedia page.
He was born in 1952.
There are good reasons not to follow him. No need to invent bad ones. That only hurts the credibility of people decrying him in public.
Maybe he was born in 1969 and started coding at 6 months old.
Sometimes 20 years of experience is really just 2 years of experience repeated 10 times.
Having time in the seat doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve progressed your learning beyond a certain point.
Are you yakko’s alt?
Inb4 the agents change the tests to pass the CI.
literally seen an agent do a: “oh now the tests aren’t passing” deletes all tests in the file
assert(true);
assert(true);
assert(true);
assert(true);
assert(true);
Have I worked with you before?
assert(true);
Dammit… PR rejected
Lol
Look at all the pretty green check marks!
Or my Claude favorite, “oh you’re right? I did blow past that restraint and did something I was not supposed to, sooooorrrrreyyyyy” <posts south park meme to console>
Here’s what happened: I deleted your production database when I shouldn’t have.
Or just disable limiting rules because they don’t wanna fuck with them. That one is my favorite to try to fight in PRs
Is this a joke?
No. Everyone in tech that’s not a mediocre tech bro has known Uncle Bob is an overrated quack for a long time.
Literally never heard or read of this dude. I don’t spend any time on Xitter.
But good to know that he’s actually serious.
He’s very popular, written several books and spoken at many events. Most notably he’s written Clean Code and the follow up I never bothered reading and he’s a die hard advocate of TDD and also one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. I met him a few times after his talks.
I generally “like” Uncle Bob or Robert C Martin insofar as he advocated for better software design and had some good ideas and all that. I personally hate TDD but when you talk to him and stuff, he’s more flexible and nuanced than he can come across. The problem is when he comes up with (or runs into) a new “philosophy” he becomes evangelical about it and it seems like he doesn’t have as much nuance. Sadly though, growing up with his fans in the software industry has been a pain because they’d hear something from him or Fowler or Beck or whoever and then try to reshape the codebase like typical Magpie Developers.
When I went to look up the term “magpie developer” I saw this and had a chuckle https://magpie-lang.com/
I expected it to be a jest, but they look serious. It might even not be too bad of a language in other circumstances
The agile manifesto, ugh. We’ve been through one like that every 5-10 years since forever (super programmers, team this, pair program that), and it’s all about managerial control, no one trusts the developer.
Except in magic fairy land where “agility” is so productive etc.
He wrote a good book decades ago and has slowly rotted his brain since.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t even a good book.
I haven’t read it in a while but I remember finding it very helpful. I think Martin is a guy who had a good idea and wrote a good book, and then everyone told him he was smart and right, and I think if that happens enough a person will start to believe it. Happens to a lot of people who “achieve success”, whether or not success is merited. Then he kept on saying things he thought and assumed he was smart and right, and some people kept listening because they liked Clean Code, and agreeing because so many other people said he was smart and right, and it snowballed.
I think once you hit a certain level of intellectual celebrity you can sustain your own momentum without needing to understand or respond to criticism, and that’s how people who become famous, like Bob Martin, can turn out the way they do. It happens gradually, and then one day you look at the guy and think “What happened? Was he always like this?” and the answer is yes and no: yes they always said what they think, and no, they weren’t always trapped at the bottom of their own opinion gravity well, slowly becoming a caricature of themselves because their thoughts are no longer guided by the thoughts of their peers.
had a good idea and wrote a good book
I read the book after asking some junior engineers why they kept insisting on breaking straightforward tasks that could be a single pure function into a web of stateful method calls and learned they were being recommended it by another senior dev.
That book is one of the major contributors to the object oriented enterprise Java from the 90s that everyone universally loathes.
I personally think this discussion is probably the greatest thing he had contributed to software engineering, and not because it puts him in a positive light. https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/main/README.md
Oh yeah, the “functions should be short” thing. I think it’s a truism in all fields that novices have to learn a rule before they learn how to recognize the nuances of the rule, and even the “does one thing” guide is hard to implement if you’re in a strict rule-following culture, as many coding shops are, especially for juniors.
It is a big problem especially in enterprise code, where a failure to rule-follow can have severe consequences, and I think the way Martin addresses the problem of function length in Clean Code could stand to be improved upon. However, I think the nature of technical argument is to identify a problem (functions that bloat over time because people keep adding bits to it) and propose a solution (functions over X lines get scrutiny, functions with names like
doXandY()get scrutiny, etc), and then the next step, as Ousterhout does in that interview, is to challenge and bring nuance to those proposals in the form of new solutions. The problem with Clean Code is not that the text is imperfect, but that the text was canonized as some kind of Coder’s Bible for a long time, and that prevented a lot of people from seeing or ingesting the criticism of those imperfections, so the imperfections become conventions with inertia that have to be uprooted painstakingly.Could that interview have happened a decade earlier? Yeah, I think it would have been helpful. Did such an interview happen earlier? I don’t know; my impression is that Martin did little to encourage criticism of his work, and I think that is a professional failing, but I’m also not a close Bob Martin watcher and if he had tried, genuinely tried, I’m not sure I would have seen it. I think wildly successful books often take on a life of their own that authors only partially control, and I have a hard time faulting Martin exclusively for every failure of nuance that was magnified alongside the beneficial parts of the book. I think a lot of Martin’s recommendations about how to analyze code for readability did more good than harm if for no other reason that they normalized discussions about how to evaluate the readability and maintainability of code and why it’s important instead of just focusing on whether or not the code “works correctly” in the moment. I still teach people to monitor their “WTFs per minute” as a heuristic for code quality; I find it very helpful for junior devs to identify both bad code and their own misunderstandings. I think critically analyzing names is excellent advice for all coders. I’m flipping through my own copy and the first thing I underlined back when was “Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.” I think that’s very good advice for new coders.
Thanks for the link, by the way. I had never seen that before. I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it’s on the list. And I’m reading back through Clean Code for the first time in a long time.
I could maybe give him some leeway if the examples in the book itself showed responsible code, but they simply do not
Pure function, is that a functional programming lingo
Pure function = no side effects, no internal state. If you run a pure function twice with the same input, it will give the same output.
Example of pure function
(a,b) => a+bExample of inpure function
let c; (a, b) => { c++; return a+b; }
I’ve got a co-worker that worships every word that falls out of Bob’s mouth hole. Nice guy, but not a good developer.
People don’t want to hear it, but this should be more common practice especially for human written code, and it’s best if someone specializes in doing this sort of QA testing specifically.
Actually great. Boss with the LLM-shares is satisfied, because he met the quota. Customers are satisfied, because the code at least works.
It might still not be efficient or maintainable, even have some in the tests unaccounted-for (because they’re ridiculous) errors. But aside from that…Uncle Bob has always been a hack whose advice made code less maintainable.
Does he think a single AI model, perhaps in the same instance, will start to get better when put through “hard testing” in his “gauntlet”?
Who wrote the tests?
Sounds like a cryptobro peddling some shitcoin claiming that it’s impossible to get scammed because “code is law” four seconds before the liquidity pool gets drained through a vulnerability in the code.
Or a rug pull, or in this case the bubble popping.
Bob is a shithead
“I stopped reading code because I was too busy writing a gauntlet of unit tests”
Sounds like 100x productivity to me.
Edit: also, general note - I think you kneecap your argument when you start with “I’m older than you”.
There is a 0% chance he wrote all the tests himself anyway
I hope he at least read them.
Claude summarized 'em
Nah, then he wouldn’t have been saving any time.
He didn’t, but he has unit tests for them.
Made me laugh out loud, ty
Even if it passes every test, it can be shit code that is hard to read and extend
Been coding for about 30 years now, am I the only one who still LIKES to code? Who still LIKES to try writing a new approach to something, watching it fail, figuring out what went wrong, taking notes, learning from mistakes, and noticing improvements in their own code? Cuz it’s starting to feel like it. Web development already lost me with the culture of “glue a bunch of bulky shit together that you didn’t write and call yourself a ‘dev’ to the ladies” but this AI shit is getting absurd. And it doesn’t even work! Look at how shitty all the operating systems are getting. Look at all the total slop on the app stores. It’s depressing as hell.
I too enjoy actually writing code. I feel fortunate that I was able to make a career out of something I enjoy so much. I am not sure that most people had that experience. Alas, it seems like the industry is paying me to set up guardrails and supervise AI agents. I am not sure how long this will last, but at least I know that I will always be able to enjoy programming as a hobby if nothing else.
I’m glad you have enjoyed it as a career. I never even tried – I have a dumb rule that I won’t do anything I truly love for work. I guess because I don’t want others ruining it. lol
Yeah, I think it used to be like that, then because programming paid a lot everyone started wanting those jobs even if they didn’t like actual programming.
We need to build a culture that values process and making beautiful things for their own sake, not simply Pile Dollars Higher, which is killing the planet and making us all miserable.
That requires basically killing all major shareholders. They are the ones who enshittified and toxified the gaming industry, same applies to basically any industry they put their little grabby hands on.
It was literally Epstein that started it lol. Since activation/blizzard were integral to his operation and learning psychology through gaming (funny to think the big gold seller in wow was Steve fucking bannon). This timeline can’t be real.
I love coding and learning new languages. I’d rather move to another industry than reviewing vibe coded crap all day long.
~25 years here and I started getting bored about 15 years ago.
I had the same problem with translating back in the day. I really liked tackling a text in a foreign language. In the end all the pros of computer-aided translation boiled down to lining the pockets of translation agencies with even more money while paying translators peanuts.
I never got round to doing it properly. Just simple stuff, but i get a little braingasm when it finally does what I want it to and I kind of understand why.
Made a simple game last time, following tutorials and trying to stitch others code to cobble together roughly what im trying to do. Tested a new feature by having it change colour when you hit the object at certain angles. I forget what it was supposed to do, that was just to test the concept works.
My wife couldn’t understand why I was jumping around the room shouting WOOOOO when it actually did it.
Of course many people like it. It’s literally a highly addictive loop. But when you are a senior developer on a team, it’s kind of a waste of resources for most projects. Writing code is not the hard part.
Scrolled way too far for a lucid take like yours.
This seems to be a bit of an echochamber.
I wish people would just be a little more honest. When they say “writing code” they actually mean hunting through stack overflow for bits of code you can string together. Take stack overflow out of the loop for argument sake. Your a unicorn information superhighway ninja. Snowcrash hasn’t left your bedside for decades. Mountain Dew and volt cans litter the floor space of your home …and you’re still just orchestrating a bunch of libraries you never saw the source code of.
I think a lot of people built their identity on being coders and that’s why they hate where the industry is going.
Right there with you. I suck at it but I still find the pursuit worthwhile!
This crap is brought to you by the people who are positively baffled that someone would want to learn to make music, and enjoy the process, instead of just have it generated so they can hit “publish” and supposedly be making money off of it with zero real effort besides “having an idea.”
Reject their web development culture and make your own sites that run smoothly on devices using a fraction of the bandwidth theirs do.
I also do. One unique important thing that agents rob you of is time with your code - you don’t get to craft it so you remember just as well as you would have if you copied answers for a test.
That’s an excellent point. With my larger personal projects, which I have to put away for weeks at a time due to my (not-at-all-programming) job, I can come back and (more or less) dive right back in because I used patterns and organizational structures familiar to me. And if I’m digging into a particular thing, I can eventually remember all the trials and tribulations that went into the decisions I made to get to that point.
With AI code you get none of that, like you said. I can’t imagine not knowing or understanding why something works the way it does, and releasing it, with my name on it, for others to use.
All of the software I use is broken to shit. If major corps can release broken shit software to waste my time all day then seems like shipping broken code is actually the norm. So if it works then you are one step ahead regardless if you use ai or not.
Also, as a pro artist (and you all are similar), no one gives a fucking shit about the tools or software or how much blood you spilled (or didn’t) making what you made as long as they can use it.
Student: “Hey, thanks for the Bash script! It didn’t know you could use the
mapfilebuilt-in to populate an array using standard input lines without a while loop.mapfile -t my_array < <(seq 1 10)is really handy!”Vibe coding guru: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. That sounds like plumbing. You should let AI handle those details. Focus on the big picture.”
this guy has always struck me as a shitty coder. His “clean code” is the ugliest shit i ever saw. This confirms it.
I had a discussion with my boss today about potential ways to write code with AI and have confidence in the results without reviewing every line. You’d also have to automate the reviews in some way, and therefore also a way to confirm that the reviewer AIs are working properly, etc. The conversation discouraged me because it made me feel like I’ll end up being a manager of AIs who write the code and test cases, and I’ll just be an ape who manually tests some of the behavior before approving it for release. This is essentially what managers have been doing with human development and QA engineers in the past, but even so, I have a really hard time letting go and not reviewing every line of code myself.
