Translates to:
“I created this (unit) test that tests code that does not exist yet…”
Alright AI bro keep your copium…
He’s done so much to enshitify the industry.
So… test driven agent developments?
Has this guy ever even written any code? Can anyone name a piece of software he’s worked on? Isn’t he like a self-help author for programmers?
Who’s this guy?
A guy, who made programming worse, especially in enterprise settings.
Depends on which parts you look at. There is plenty that he wrote about that have made coding enjoyable, but yes, also plenty that is the opposite.
I never saw his book as a bible though. I always thought of it as a “here are possibly good ideas, see which you and your team likes”.
People don’t like tracing what something is doing across 12 7-line functions spread through multiple files?
The code had the single responsibility to waste your time
I choose to believe this is satire. Also that this man holds no significant position of prominence within the industry.
/cope
this man holds no significant position of prominence within the industry.
I wish that was true but I’ve had to specifically countermand his teachings at 2 different companies because newbies were being told to read his book
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.
“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.
Boomers have been noted in studies to display worse cognitive decline at their age than any prior generation and it shows.
Its almost universally a generation that absolutely refuses to learn or adapt to the changes the world has experienced since Reagan, to the point of violence.
The only difference between this guy and other boomers is he’s at least someone up to date with modern technology. Most boomers don’t even know how to use smart phones or self checkout. You know… technology they’ve only had ALMOST 2 FUCKING DECADES TO BECOME ACCUSTOMED TO.
I’m not defending boomers in any way, but I see the same thing with younger people; that is the allergic reaction to learning about technology. I work in technology, so that’s is my sole perspective. I would wager that plenty of young people are allergic to learning about ANYTHING, I just see the tech part.
I don’t expect people outside of my vocation to be experts, but I can’t imagine wanting to be utterly confused by the world at large–the world in which technology is literally everywhere. What would one’s life be like if you had no clue how any of it worked? You just live in some sort of magical world where digital pixies do everything for you? You’re not at all curious how it works? What about when it goes wrong? You just stand there and softly weep in a puddle of your own piss until someone rescues you?
I feel this way about cars too. I don’t expect everyone to be a mechanic, but people will drive around with THE most horrible sounds coming out of their car and they’re like “yeah, it started doing that a while back”. Zero interest in perhaps having someone look at it or concern that it may turn into a bigger or more expensive problem in the future? A problem that they will have to pay for personally?
The entire life approach of being absolutely rigid to change or new information is such a puzzle to me. Life is hard enough, and these people just want to make it harder all because they’re scared that they may have to put a little brainpower into learning something on their own?
Holy technical debt, uncle Bob.
So, basically, he just reinvented constraint programming
Look, I don’t care what you do with your gherkin, Uncle Bob, but you do it in private, OK?
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.
It’s all that gherkin testing, isn’t it?
