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[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 78 points 3 days ago

Programming is one of those skills and industries that is accessible enough that basically anyone can do it, but you will run into trouble later if you're doing anything serious without learning how to do it well. There are hundreds or thousands of ways to make something work, but if it's an unmaintainable mess or you don't even understand how it works, then we end up with our financial institutions running COBOL in 2025. Good luck when regulations change. Have fun when your operating system becomes unsupported and you have to replace the underlying dependencies. Hope your boss doesn't sue when they have to hire people to rewrite your hackjob.

And these were all already problems before AI code came onto the scene. We had the programming equivalent of script kiddies, people who would blindly copy and paste code from web searches without even reading the date or the comments saying "this is bad and this is why". But this probably makes it even easier to do, and possibly harder to spot. Combine this with how many universities don't even focus on lower-level languages so you get plenty of people who can't understand how to fix any of the trickier errors in their code. And that's not to say everyone has to be able to, but it's a problem when so few are able to. So these programmers are unlikely to know if the code has problems so long as it passes their tests, and unlikely to know how to fix those problems when they become clear.

Automation tools are good ideas for assisting and detecting possible mistakes. They're not good at generating that much code. In fact, that amount of code in that amount of time is suspicious, hinting that it's unlikely to be well-designed, maintainable or efficient.

[-] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This is a great write-up. And a bit generous to the "developer" in question.

I'm not entirely sure I've written 250,000 lines of code yet, in my entire decades as a professional developer. If I have, it's a near thing.

Not to brag, but I can reuse existing libraries and get many things done with 5 or 10 lines of code.

It's hard to crack 250,000 when 5-10 lines solves each of my employer's problems.

And this young developer supposedly solved one problem with 250,000 lines of code.

After giving it some thought, I'm like ~~90%~~ 40% (edit: okay, 40% after hearing some anecdotes, haha.) sure this is just a parody post. Even AI can't be that bad at this, right?

[-] OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

This kind of thing is real. Newbies don't have experience to know how important architecture is. They continuously mash code without thinking too much. Generative machines have made the problem orders of magnitude worse. It used to be limited to the amount of garbage a human could mash into their keyboard. Now it's like generated art. People churn out infinite images. They haven't actually drawn the image themselves.

[-] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know "lines of code" is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can't imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

[-] Gumbyyy@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

I agree with your main point, although I think your example of COBOL being used to this day in financial institutions is actually the opposite problem. The guys that originally developed that shit were damn good programmers, but they were severely constrained by the available hardware, limitations of the language, etc. So they had to get really clever in order to make these massive, complicated systems work. In my experience, those really old legacy systems tend to be rock solid with near 100% uptime and almost no errors. They've never been rewritten because doing so would be a multi-year effort costing millions of dollars, and the end result would be a system that is most likely slower, buggier, and has less functionality.

TLDR: The old COBOL systems are unmaintainable messes not because of incompetent developers, but because the limitations of the available technology when they were originally developed forced a bunch of really good devs to have to get extremely creative and hacky with their solutions.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

Good correction, and I definitely didn't mean to suggest those programmers were unskilled. In their case, and like you said, the maintainability issues were often a result of technical limitations.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

Even if the original developers weren't rock stars, the codebase was feature-complete in the 80s or earlier and they've spent the decades since then eliminating nearly every single bug.

The real issue is that it's expensive to add new features compared to a modern codebase , and it's very difficult to find COBOL programmers in 2025.

Eventually a bank is going to take the gamble and rewrite everything in a modern language, and designed with modern tech in mind. But, it's going to be a huge gamble. And, I can guarantee you, they're not going to be vibe-coding it.

this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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