this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Except it’s a computer writing the code that somebody probably ran once and said ‘looks good’ for their ‘happy path’ and committed it. So it’s inevitably probably full of weird edge case bugs…have fun.
I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there's really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there's no need for debugging.
Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.
Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.
Good programmers (and I don't mean just at the coding level) make less bugs exactly because they want to avoid bug fixing as much as possible.
They still have to do debugging - and hence have to be good at it - just less often than if they didn't invest any time into figuring out ways of working that reduce the rate of bugs in their work (and, again, this is at more levels than just coding).
I think that misconception of "good coders do not produce bugs" in anchored in the totally wrong idea that it's at all possible to make code without bugs - the way I see it the path to being a "good coder" must go through being good at debugging and just wanting to avoid doing it as much because how how much more time it takes to have to go all the way down to using the debugger to find bugs than doing things like at least some analysis upfront of the program requirements, using proper naming conventions to reduce the likelihood of the kind of bugs that comes from confusing variables and structuring you code so that you don't get lost or don't forget things (especially for code you don't see for months and later come back to having forgotten the logic you were following with it).
I've done some programming without proper debuggers (embedded stuff in shitty shit microcontrollers, shader programming) and it's a total PITA.
i’m terrified of people who think this way. my experience has been that they are much less inclined to check for bugs in their code and tend to produce much buggier code
AI code is not clever. It's all developers averaged. Even if it worked properly, you'd get average quality code.
It's rather lazy and cheap. This is where the quality is lacking.
Some of the JavaScript code I’ve seen I’d call ‘clever’ because it uses certain parts of the language that are technically in the spec or are just weird casting side effects that I hope no normal developer would actually use because it’s unreadable. I’m sure ‘somebody’ used it because the AI picked up on it but it’s not exactly something that should be replicated.
Some colleges are letting students use AI code to do their assignments. I’d expect that ‘average quality’ to get so much worse over time and I’m not sure the developers are going to be getting any better right along with it. They can continue to turn in work they probably don’t fully understand to begin with.
I don't like the term "clever" in code, because sometimes it means "I'm too dumb to understand it". Simply don't touch clever code, unless you really understand it.
Best example is the fast inverse square root function in Quake. Yeah.. it's clever, but replace it by simple maths and let Quake have performance problems.
On the other hand, using AI for more than assisted coding is never clever. Some day some fuck will use it in medicine and will actually kill people. AI is not at fault here! It's the programmer who killed a patient in this case by being irresponsible and lazy.
The pain in the arse which is debugging is what motivated me to, as my career progressed, improve my coding, improve my software design, improve my systems design, even improved my software development process and standards and eventually that even extended to getting those I worked with to also improving those things as I sometimes ended up having to debug their bugs.
Debugging definitelly makes better techies, IMHO, mainly because of the lengths people will go to in order the avoid having to do it.