"It is unavoidable. It is your destiny. You, like your father, are now mine."
Uncle Bob: It's Over
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#32English is the new programming language.
I'm not sure I agree, but I can see it used as an open-ended interview question. "Is English the new programming language?" It would be a good test if someone gravitates towards pedantry (AIs can speak another common language just as well!) or if they actually get into the difference between prompting and programming, or whether it's at its core an LLM or just an AI based on transformer architecture. Extra points for having it be part of an async interview and interviewees using an LLM to write the answer, and interviewers using LLMs to grade them.
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did he do?
Wealthy white dude edging towards senility taking a liking to bathrobe social media shorts. Take a guess. It's going to involve a political party and a lot of weird public takes unrelated to software.
White men are not allowed to grow old? How come?
Doesn't really seem fair, I'm gonna be a old white man some day, ain't really that much I can do about it...(Well, I suppose sex changes are a thing now, but really?)
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#34The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…
There are definitely tasks you can prompt an AI in 5 minutes that would take a whole day to do. One example is adding something to a CI pipeline and getting it to green (i.e. maybe you're adding your first ever e2e test), especially when your CI pipeline is painfully slow. e.g. if your pipeline takes 30 minutes to finish, and it takes around 10 tries to figure out all the random problems, that was easily a full day task before AI. Now I prompt AI to figure it out, which takes 5 minutes of active attention, and it figures it out for the rest of the day while I do other stuff.
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#35It’s hard to give up, but likely necessary. That doesn’t mean quality has to suffer, we can still gate with deterministic quality tooling where it matters. But yeah, at some scale it stops mattering how human readable the code is, as long as AI can effectively and efficiently (token-wise) make edits or add features.
The point is not human readability, but good structure. Spaghetti code is as bad for an LLM as for a human, because structural complexity and the amount of coupling are fundamental limits, not human-specific.
That’s where the tooling comes in!
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#36He helped enshitify the industry - empowering midlings to cry about "clean code" instead of actually learning to produce a great product. No thanks, Bob.
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#37The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…
The delta isn't a day to 5 minutes, but a day to a half hour (where most of my larger tickets take)? Yes, especially as you don't need to watch it do its thing anymore.
To me, the lack of amazing productivity gains is that we have done nothing to speed up figuring out what to build and nothing to speed up getting code into production from pull request and in a lot of companies, code review is already saturated.
Also, the agents are good at figuring out problems for themselves, so I can ask it to set up a CI/CD pipeline, give it GitHub access, and it will just try things until it succeeds.
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#38The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…
Yep. It depends so much on task, expectations, ability to express what you want and whether the problem has been solved elsewhere or not.
The results are always so ridiculously different.
Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over
#39More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned.
As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly on a plane controlled by AI-designed and AI-tested code, but much of development is busy work, not problem solving or design. AI excels at turning a protocol spec into a parser for example. I'll take that any day. AI excels at finding stuff, particularly non-code, thesis-level ideas for algorithms and also at about the same level, what's been shown not to work when solving a non-deterministic problem.
If we're lucky, AI will fill in after exposing who is only doing busy work and who is creating.