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
scamentrepreneurial 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.
I’m shocked, shocked þat “CEO @ userjourneys.ai” would suggest AI is better þan human developers.
Shocked.
þat and þan? Do you mean ðat and ðan?
Using eth and thorn to show the voiced-unvoiced distinction is basically only a thing in Icelandic and the IPA (and even then it’s not a consistent feature of Icelandic), and when they were used in English they seem to have been basically interchangeable
That said if someone wants to bring them back to English it seems to me like using them to distinguish the sounds is the most sensible approach, it’s the one that makes spelling less ambiguous even if it doesn’t have a historical foundation in English
That said if someone wants to bring them back to English it seems to me like using them to distinguish the sounds is the most sensible approach
I think this user just does it for attention.
If 1 then odd. If 2 then even. If 3 then odd. Etc
My sloc is amazing. It works (unless you care about performance) and AI might even be trustworthy to continue the pattern.
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.
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The code:
I used to think this is pretty much how games were really made when I was a tiny child. I couldn’t get over how many images needed to be created to get every possibility from every angle.
I used to think that a 3D game would need to have any possible still image pre-rendered and ready, just gotta show them all in the right order depending on user input.
I watched this awhile ago and it was very interesting how they made super small games for NES.
Can they come take my job any sooner so I can finally retire, please?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a great write-up. And a bit generous to the “developer” in question.
I’m not entirely sure I’ve written 250,000 lines of code yet, in my entire decades as a professional developer. If I have, it’s a near thing.
Not to brag, but I can reuse existing libraries and get many things done with 5 or 10 lines of code.
It’s hard to crack 250,000 when 5-10 lines solves each of my employer’s problems.
And this young developer supposedly solved one problem with 250,000 lines of code.
After giving it some thought, I’m like
90%40% (edit: okay, 40% after hearing some anecdotes, haha.) sure this is just a parody post. Even AI can’t be that bad at this, right?This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently
curlis ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.This kind of thing is real. Newbies don’t have experience to know how important architecture is. They continuously mash code without thinking too much. Generative machines have made the problem orders of magnitude worse. It used to be limited to the amount of garbage a human could mash into their keyboard. Now it’s like generated art. People churn out infinite images. They haven’t actually drawn the image themselves.
From my experience, being “good” at vibe coding is more about being unable to detect flaws in AI generated code rather than being able to code well. Add AI to the workflow of someone who actually understands scalability and maintenance and that won’t be able to get past a couple functions before they drop the AI.
Also, assuming this kid gets weekends off, he would be writing 12k lines of code each day. I don’t think the average programmer could even review that number of lines in a day, so there’s likely no actual supervision for what the kid is feeding into the codebase.
I’d estimate within four months the project will be impenetrable, and they’ll scrap the whole thing.
Also, assuming this kid gets weekends off, he would be writing 12k lines of code each day. I don’t think the average programmer could even review that number of lines in a day
I usually estimate that it takes 1-2 hours of highly focused work to review 1k lines of code well (this is not even considering that this is AI-generated mess that probably requires a lot more attention). A typical developer is capable of ~6 hours of focused work per day (8-10 with a lot of caffeine). So no, according to my estimates at least there’s no way in hell this gets any review at all.
In what world? 1k lines is a lot… Even a few hundred can take hours if everything is unknown, code is legacy, and naming is bad.
Like if there is a line like this
memcpy(ptr, src, 4 * 6 * sizeof(real));-
What’s that 4?
-
What’s that 6?
-
Is real a float? A double?? What are we copying, where, why???
This is a line I saw recently. 1k code is huge even if readable.
Ok, sure, for low-level C/C++ code with memory management and such it takes a lot longer than 2h per 1000 lines. For business logic in higher-level programming languages it’s usually fine.
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I, a 10x developer, can hit approve on at least 50k lines a day. 30k if you want me to also add a “LGTM” comment
The democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.
For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.
Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.
Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…
Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.
Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.
One of my biggest pet-peeves right now is tech companies selling paid, proprietary “low code/no code” software as “democratic”. Especially when writing code was never the hard part of software development, it’s designing usable, scalable, and efficient data structures and algorithms.
Yeah we’re gooing to need to go back and clean up the internet from 2022-50. Because of the scam they call AI it’s only going to get worse.
250k lines of ai generated code means he didn’t do anything
Yeah like whoopty doo you created 250k lines of cruft that someone competent will have to sift through later
250K lines of code in a month means about 10k lines per day.
For an 8 hour work day (since they donchild labour, it might as well be 16, but let’s keep it simple) that is about 1000 lines of code per hour, so about 20 lines of code per minute. Give or take
Unless you trust the output of AI implicitly without checking anything, ever, there is no way on this earth this can be done by a single person.
Then, an actual senior developer would be required to evaluate each method he wrote, but I’m sure this 10 year old child with zero experience will suffice
So basically, this guy just uses a child to tell chatgpt similar to vomit out text that likely may not even compile, let alone do what it needs to do correctly, with the right security protocols, all with the underlying infrastructure.
All of this is bullshit and that CEO should be arrested for child labor
Well, what he did was bringing something into the code base that might blow up the whole company one day in the future. Because what he didn’t do was thoroughly review the code that the AI made.
Kill all CEOs
Both Ai and Child labour problem solved!
I love the two laptops, nice touch. You really need two to code this hard!
Guaranteed cope. Cope that’s desperately trying to sell you AI, because it’s bleeding money.
I hope he didn’t use Claude because oh boy it maybe costed more than a real developer.
yeah NO SHIT he’s the “10x developer”, he’s working on TWO laptops at once !
red flag number 1: measuring progress in lines of code
redflag number 2: not seeing the issue with accepting 250k lines of code generated by AI supervised by a teenager without a software engineering background
Wdym man the guy has 10 years of experience
10 years using the restroom all by themselves. Very impressive!
Professional shit generator
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Did you reply to the wrong comment? I don’t understand
I did. That’s why I deleted it but I guess that didn’t federate to your instance as fast as my fuckup
