Uncle Bob: It's Over • Hacker News Board

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#41

Post by ozlikethewizard » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

adriand wrote: post #9

Kind of a great video! I enjoyed it. His point about testing coverage and generating mutations to ensure the tests fail resonated. I get concerned sometimes that the AI is writing tests not to ensure the logic is correct, but to ensure the tests pass against the code it already wrote. Any other ideas on this? Is there a code review step or CI checkpoint that would decrease the likelihood of that?

To be fair the overwhelming majority of tests I've seen in the wild written by humans have been the same. Not a lot of good material for AI to learn from.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#42

Post by 2ndorderthought » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

amarant wrote: post #33

2ndorderthought wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Of course they are. I'm only stating a trend so people can infer.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#43

Post by tonyarkles » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

doginasuit wrote: post #17

There are probably some respectable workflows that involve an LLM writing most of the code, but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem. You still have to tell it what to write and how it should work or there are high odds that you'll get a hot mess. And there still needs to be a human that understands everything there and how to debug it. For me, the most enjoyable path there is to w…

> but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem

I agree to some extent with regards to writing new code. One piece where I have been perpetually impressed is at asking it to put together a plausible explanation of how something weird has happened. I have been blown away, multiple times, by Codex and Claude’s ability to take a prompt like “When I did X, I expected Y to happen but instead observed Z. Put together an explanation for how that could happen, including the individual lines of code that can lead to ending up in that state.”

In one notable case, it traced through a pretty complex sensor fusion -> computational geometry problem and identified a particular calculation far upstream that could go negative in certain circumstances, which would lead to a function far downstream generating a polygon with incorrect winding order (clockwise instead of CCW).

In another, it identified a variable that was being initialized to 0 instead of initialized to (a specific runtime value that it should’ve been initialized to during a state transition). The downstream effect, minutes later, would be pathological behaviour that would happen exactly once per boot.

In both cases I was provided with a specific causal chain of events with individual source files and line numbers so that I could verify the plausibility of the explanation myself.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#44

Post by oytis » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

That gotta be a joke right? It's like running agents to write agent ochestrators to write orchestrators for orchestrators just for clean code

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#45

Post by whstl » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

tgma wrote: post #15

For all LLM flaws, if it kills the whole Agile/SCRUM/whatever grift, it will have been worth it. The damage these guys have done to software industry at large is unfathomable.

Hot take, but the bureaucracy of Scrum, the Figmafication of design and the disdain of PMs for iterative deliveries generates more work and waste than AIs are able to save.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#46

Post by cmiles74 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

I don't have a lot of patience for Bob. That being said I have to agree with him on test coverage (that's as far as I made it through his monologue). IMHO, that is something that I 100% am okay letting the LLM tooling write and manage. I used to argue about whether or not we needed a test that verified that the value of a constant didn't change, and if 100% coverage was really that important. Now I don't care, I just let Claude write the test and keep it up-to-date.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#47

Post by andrewl » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

That was a bizarre performance.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#48

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

amarant wrote: post #33

2ndorderthought wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Are you going to be wealthy, with your head buried in the firehose of an algorithmic feed? Those are things you can do something about.

Alternatively, you could take a crack at deconstructing whiteness. Depending how young you currently are, you might be able to make a dent by the time you're an old man. That's trickier though, because it involves serious social reform. Or if sociology isn't your deal, maybe you could become a biologist, and cure old age?

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#49

Post by runarberg » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

2ndorderthought wrote: post #26

an0malous wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

Even just purely on a professional level, he’s clean code architecture was very bad advice, which was marketed and hyped up to something it never deserved. The software industry should have cancelled Uncle Bob like archeologists cancelled Graham Hancock purely for his professional opinions (though I am not against cancelling him for his political opinions either; we can do both).

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#50

Post by Aurornis » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #34

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #16

The 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 t…

I mean I wasn’t sitting around unproductively waiting for 30 minute CI runs to finish before LLMs came along, either.

I also like to use LLMs for background work on iterative tasks, but the way some people talk about work in the days before LLMs make me realize how we’re arriving at these claims that LLMs make us 10X more productive. If it took someone all day to do a few minutes of active work then I could see how LLMs would feel like a 10X or 50X productivity unlocker simply by not shutting down and doing nothing at the first sign of a pause.