Laurent Bercot

843 Followers
46 Following
7.8K Posts

Grumpy Frenchman, C/Unix addict, author of s6 and other software at skarnet.org.

Good tech (so, probably not the tech you're thinking about), energy transition and climate change, leftist politics, psychology and self-improvement, pillow philosophy, songwriting and production, mechanisms of storytelling, video games as an art medium, shitposting.

Personal websitehttps://skarnet.org
Business websitehttps://skarnet.com
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/laurentbercot
Githubhttps://github.com/skarnet

If you don’t have the resources to write and understand the code yourself, you don’t have the resources to maintain it either.

Any monkey with a keyboard can write code. Writing code has never been hard. People were churning out crappy code en masse way before generative AI and LLMs. I know because I’ve seen it, I’ve had to work with it, and I no doubt wrote (and continue to write) my share of it.

What’s never been easy, and what remains difficult, is figuring out the right problem to solve, solving it elegantly, and doing so in a way that’s maintainable and sustainable given your means.

Code is not an artefact, code is a machine. Code is either a living thing or it is dead and decaying. You don’t just write code and you’re done. It’s a perpetual first draft that you constantly iterate on, and, depending on what it does and how much of that has to do with meeting the evolving needs of the people it serves, it may never be done. With occasional exceptions (perhaps? maybe?) for well-defined and narrowly-scoped tools, done code is dead code.

So much of what we call “writing” code is actually changing, iterating on, investigating issues with, fixing, and improving code. And to do that you must not only understand the problem you’re solving but also how you’re solving it (or how you thought you were solving it) through the code you’ve already written and the code you still have to write.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the hardest things in development is understanding someone else’s code, let alone fixing it when something doesn’t work as it should. Because it’s not about knowing this programming language or that (learning a programming language is the easiest part of coding), or this framework or that, or even knowing this design pattern or that (although all of these are important prerequisites for comprehension) but understanding what was going on in someone else’s head when they wrote the code the way they wrote it to solve a particular problem.

It frankly boggles my mind that some people are advocating for automating the easy part (writing code) by exponentially scaling the difficult part (understanding how exactly someone else – in this case, a junior dev who knows all the hows of things but none of the whys – decided to solve the problem). It is, to borrow a technical term, ass-backwards.

They might as well call vibe coding duct-tape-driven development or technical debt as a service.

🤷‍♂️

#AI #LLMs #vibeCoding #softwareDevelopment #design #craft

Le barreau de Lyon a voté en assemblée générale une grève totale qui concerne tous les contentieux et toutes les juridictions à compter du 2 avril à minuit et jusqu’au 16 avril inclus

Communication publique

(Alt en réponse)

#grevedesavocats
#justice
#droitsfondamentaux

Ok, today’s xkcd is glorious!

[edit] I should probably mention you need to visit the site for the full effect, it’s more than just a comic today!

https://xkcd.com/3227/

Creation

xkcd

I never wanted to have a LinkedIn account & was forced to create one over a decade ago. I never used the account. I deleted it last year.
If you haven't deleted your #LinkedIn yet - you may want to.

https://graphics.social/@metin/116335353888270814

Metin Seven 🎨 (@[email protected])

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer https://browsergate.eu #tech #technology #BigTech #IT #enshittification #microslop #microsoft #LinkedIn #social #media #SocialMedia #data #security #safety #InfoSec #internet #web

Graphics.social
Krita’s Maintainer is awesome!

Anthropic, I’ll make you a deal:

Re-train your model without a single line of my open source contributions as input, and I will gladly refrain from ever copying or sharing the code •you• generated by (in part) using •mine•.

IT'S HAPPENING

GITHUB, THE FIRST ENTERPRISE CLOUD SOLUTION TO REACH ZERO NINES RELIABILITY

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

#github

Current vibes

All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with

(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)

@dalias @aredridel @timnitGebru But it got even worse this week with the #Claude code revelations. System prompting your agent to mimic humans deliberately in an effort to evade flagging at code reviews? REALLY? This is #Anthropic 's #Carter #Burke from #Aliens moment. Flagrant abuses of otherwise unwritten social contracts like this are exactly what needs to get these companies sh!tcanned from democratic society. Have they no shame? It was fair to assume they were scooping up user data at scale