He fails to mention that he has AI also generate and do all of those tests, which means, A) he has no quality supervision over his quality supervision. Speaking from experience, AI can and will break a test in order to pass it rather than fixing the code if it randomly decides to. It is not always reliable and does not have even the baseline of good sense you would expect a brand new junior dev to have. And B) he’s probably spending 3 times as much on tokens used for generating and running tests than he is already using on code generation. That’s only going to be sustainable while these tokens remain cheap, which won’t be for much longer, my guy.
Also it is always fun when someone asks you basic questions about your code and you have to admit complete and total ignorance because you neither wrote nor read a single line of it. How are you going to sell confidence in your black box that even you haven’t peeked inside?
The D Language Foundation tried to incorporate LLMs in the unittests, and they created something akin to
assert(5 + (funcToTest(846) * 0) == 5)early on, now they want to use it to rewrite the standard library from scratch, because “it has become better since”.The other day I had Claude write some code that failed a unit test. It was failing at a step that ran
assertEquals(actualMap, expectedMap);. The reason it was failing was because one of the values in the map, a UUID, is automatically generated in the code. In the test, it has been hard coded.Anyone with any sense would know you need to handle that misalignment. Omit that field from the match assertion? Set that UUID based on the generated value instead of hardcoding it? Anything like that would work just fine.
But Claud’s solution was to change that assertion to
assertTrue("The actualMap and expectedMap will never be equal because the values of ID will never match");. So the test always passes and it explicitly notes that they will not match. I would have fired a Junior Dev on the spot for writing that solution.
So, basically, he just reinvented constraint programming
I choose to believe this is satire. Also that this man holds no significant position of prominence within the industry.
/cope
Look, I don’t care what you do with your gherkin, Uncle Bob, but you do it in private, OK?
“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.
I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60’s
Yeah, appeal to tangentially related experience, age and arrogance aren’t a way to inspire confidence in your work.
We live in the perfect times to display that experience, age and arrogance haven’t been working in almost any field, from politics to LLM development. We’ve yet to witness any system that operates well, while also eliminating human oversight. It doesn’t matter the guard rails you put in place. They’re only as strong as your personal ability to evaluate your own product, which itself is a conflict of interest.
Edit: Also, you can’t use your own credentials to assert the integrity of work you aren’t even actually doing yet passing as your own.
Not to be too flippant, but:
Boomers gonna boom.
They literally can’t help themselves, they’re egomaniacal narcissists.
The rare ones that aren’t that way can truly be awesome sources of perspective… but goddamnit so many of them are completely insufferable man-babies.
Holy technical debt, uncle Bob.
Glad to see the angry mob is alive and well on Lemmy.
Don’t hate AI? Lemmy users will find reasons to hate you.
There’s a difference between hating AI and calling out morons. This dude a moron, plain and simple. Even the dude who coined the phrase “context engineering” doesn’t think AI can produce good code without a human actually reading the code at some point in the process.
Did daddy Elon or Dario praise you yet?
We recently had an example of this. See Bun vs Zig. Even if your LLM doesn’t have meaningless tests and assertions, those will not have 100% coverage on any non-trivial code base.
One thing I do love about the LLM era is that people get forced to be way more pendantic when it comes to code, and that’s a win for everyone.
… Well admist the enormous losses LLM brings
In my experience, agents tend to write functions significantly longer than 12 lines. Where’s your clean code Bob?
Schrödinger’s code: both clean and spaghetti until reviewed.
If it’s his own products and no-one else needs to work that code I don’t see a big problem with it, but the ways I’ve seen agents treat a code base just to pass tests is horrible.
I do a lot of vibe coding, but even I know this is bullshit.
So in other words he spends weeks to write extra tests so that the agent can save him days of coding.
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
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.
