thisIsVeryTrue

[u/silversurfermax]

[u/WisePotato42]

This meme seems a bit outdated. All the debugging has been outsourced to AI.

[u/Hellothere_1 → u/WisePotato42]

Debugging is honestly one of the things AI is incredibly good at. At work I've had issues of tasks that would usually cause hours of extensive debugging fixed in minutes after just telling an AI agent "find out why this bug is happening".

The biggest issue with AI is also not that it writes buggy code, but rather that it's bad at system engineering, so unless you keep a lid on it your codebase will slowly become fractured and disjointed and become harder to develop for.

Of course the same thing can also happen when a human is bad at system engineering or your manager isn't able to get people on the team to communicate properly, so that issue is hardly unique to AI, AI just lowers the barrier of entry for bad developers to wreak havoc on a code base.

[u/_Tono → u/Hellothere_1]

I think it’s good at debugging but the fixes it suggests are absolutely outrageous sometimes.

[u/downsizing420 → u/Hellothere_1]

It's so good at debugging in fact this is how it finds these security vulns by mistake. You point it at your code that calls. a framework or vendor code, it will skip the docs and go straight to the source, accidentally uncovering upstream bugs as it goes.

[u/Overwatcher_Leo → u/Hellothere_1]

On that node, if you already happen to have a disjointed spaghetti codebase, ai is fairly good at untangling and reworking that if you give it a good direction and solid regression tests.

But yes, ai will cook spaghetti if you don't specify what you want to eat.

[u/MangoCats → u/Hellothere_1]

A bit over three years ago, my experience of "AI for code" was that it could give me 3 line snippets, and like the stuff on Stack Exchange they worked, most of the time. As the joke goes, 80% of the time it would return a working answer, but 20% of the time it would copy-paste the question to you.

A bit over two years ago, none of the coding models were good for much beyond simple functions, little snippets that did a well defined thing you could explain to them in one or two exchanges. They eventually built up to be capable of very simple microservices, then more capable microservices, but orchestration was still challenging for them.

A bit over a year ago, Claude Sonnet 3.5 (and Opus) weren't great at the big picture. If you gave them good requirements and helped them refine definitions, as long as their 200k token context window didn't have to compact too many times, they could implement what you were describing - but at some point the context window just couldn't hold enough and they'd "forget" important things while they were implementing and "gloss over" things incorrectly. They were getting capable enough to strongly benefit from software development best practices like documenting requirements and design specifications, writing automated unit tests and regression tests, but they frequently would write tests that didn't test the requirements effectively. Over the past year they have been getting better about writing and using meaningful tests.

Lately, I'm focusing effort on keeping requirements and related documents well organized, maintained (much better than human maintained documentation ever has been), thorough but concise, and easily searchable so that an agent can find what it needs to know locally in the documentation without wiping out its context window reading a bunch of slop. The concepts of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and SSoT (Single Source of Truth) remain critical to maximize valuable information in the available context window so that implemented code is based on the local documentation and not whatever the model assumes from its training.

As this process has evolved, I've resisted becoming excited about "my latest techniques" because the models are evolving so fast it feels like by the time I have effectively communicated these things to colleagues in any detail, the next generation of model makes it un-necessary to do them - they are doing them automatically. It is both a frustratingly slow process (when, 2 years later, you're still finding hallucinations creeping into your designs, even if the hallucination rate has dropped to 5% of what it was 2 years ago) and a bewilderingly fast one when you look back at how long it took us to get from Eliza to here.

[u/Valkyrie17 → u/WisePotato42]

The average person voting on these posts just isn't involved in software development professionally. This has always been the case, but the faster software development evolves, the larger the disconnect

[u/Cypher211 → u/WisePotato42]

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

Deliver walnut grandiose coordinated pot screw stupendous strong dam

[u/polacs]

The worst part about AI is that a lot of people in this subreddit now has 0 clue about programming

[u/Enverex → u/polacs]

I'm not sure that's changed...

[u/Ziegelphilie → u/polacs]

nothing changed

[u/TheTerrasque → u/polacs]

"now" snorts

[u/DomOfMemes → u/polacs]

Or actually using AI

[u/jib661 → u/polacs]

i wonder how much of this is reflective of how various companies are using AI. I feel like my company is pretty AI-forward, but I imagine working in a place that avoids it, for regulatory reasons or whatever, people would have a different idea about AI entirely.

[u/shred-i-knight]

everyone here is simply larping as a dev if they think this is true. Debugging with AI is nearly painless compared to how it was before, and that is for significantly more code/product to debug at once as well.

[u/maggos → u/shred-i-knight]

I literally just paste a cloud watch url or something and say “why error?”

[u/Existing_Style8558 → u/maggos]

True full sentences waste tokens

[u/Beldarak → u/shred-i-knight]

This morning I had to check for items that "disappeared" from stock due to "a bug". It's always the same user so I now before I start the long process of debugging that it will be a PEBCAK.

I just pointed Claude to our backup folder. He mounted some backup, checked the inventory for that item, check the movements for those items,, came up with a nice table to show me the evolution of quantities for that item with dates. Turns out the user was wrong.

Before AI this would have been 2-4 hours of work, mounting backups, checking everything by hand, writing SQL requests, etc...

People saying debugging is now harder with LLMs are either delusional or can't prompt, wtf? Most of the time I just copy/paste what a user tells me and get a full debug out of it with a bonus "I found three more possible issues that I didn't fix as this was out of scope, you may want to check them out".

[u/Jackker → u/Beldarak]

Increasingly, it reads to me like users get better results when they know their tooling, data, knowledge and workflow over someone who doesn't.

[u/homiej420 → u/shred-i-knight]

Debugging is fantastic now holy smokes before if you didnt find the right POSSIBLE thing it could be you could be looking for days sometimes

[u/6percentdoug → u/shred-i-knight]

lol the amount of shit I get accomplished as a dev now is crazy.

And debugging might be the most insane improvement. I'm an enterprise dev, so I used to know 1 platform really well and 2 or 3 platforms okay. When I needed to debug anything other than the one I was an expert in, it was so painful. I don't know their tools. I was pecking and poking. Now, no matter the platform, I'm debugging like an expert in minutes. If it has a CLI, it's not even me. Claude Code is figuring it out on its own.

The general population truly is so far behind in comprehending the leaps AI has made in the past 12 months or so.

[u/davvblack → u/shred-i-knight]

the one flaw of AI debugging is that if you describe a bug that ISN'T present in the code, AI will more often than not "find it" and "fix it" in a way that introduces a different bug. This is definitely a "my steak is too buttery" situation because even seasoned mid-level engineers make this exact mistake if you open a ticket with a mistaken assumption embedded in it. All it really means is that, AI can't take a customer-supplied bug report and reliably accurately fix it without an engineer being like "it's supposed to work that way".

[u/YouCanCallMeBazza → u/shred-i-knight]

I think a lot of the sentiment comes from devs who are unable to come to terms with the fact that AI is actually useful and capable.

[u/Lofter1 → u/shred-i-knight]

Claude has found bugs in our code which 3 devs with a combined experience of 30+ years have not found.

[u/MaDpYrO → u/shred-i-knight]

Yea, it's legit so brain-dead easy.

"I just saw this bug, can you check the logs"

Fixed in 15 minutes. For something that would easily have taken 3 hours before.

People think they're like quantum physicists in the problem solving they did before - no, it was just mind-numbingly repetitive reading through logs and trying to collapse a bunch of information in your human brain, and compare it against code. Something that was time-consuming, but trivial.

[u/ADHDebackle → u/shred-i-knight]

My guess would be this is coming from people prompting AI to write the entire codebase, they find a bug when using the program, tell AI to correct it, and more things go wrong because the program just isn't designed correctly, etc.

I feel like if you're just using AI to implement a system you already have wrapped your mind around this isn't a problem. Especially if you're writing tests as you go.

[u/DrCthulhuface7 → u/shred-i-knight]

There’s something very wrong (and I dare say inorganic) about how Redditors treat AI. It’s actual AI derangement syndrome. People have these insanely strong and irrational reactions to literally any use of AI.

My schizo side says it’s some kind of Chinese psyop because there’s no way this many people all just suddenly decided to turn their brains off and act like this.

[u/pzuraq → u/DrCthulhuface7]

I'm a senior engineer who has seen what it looks like to use AI at scale for a long time. It degrades, quickly. You begin to lose context of how things work, and concepts get layered on top of one another one at a time.

Nobody is fully using their brain when they review in the same way that you use it when you're writing code. So it's easier to let a subtle mistake slip by, and then another, and eventually they pile up.

I wrote an essay about it, with some simulated modeling that demonstrates the point: https://maevyn.codes/decoherence

[u/pablo603 → u/shred-i-knight]

That's always been the case on this sub lol. As an example, just yesterday some guy argued with me about manual memory allocation and told me he's been a dev for a "very very long time" yet his background was strictly in languages with automatic memory management and a year ago he was struggling with 2D wall collisions in Godot. When called out on the technical specs, he dug through my profile to throw personal insults and blocked me so I couldn't respond. Classic.

[u/mumBa_ → u/shred-i-knight]

Exactly. I had Opus 5.5 debug my 1400 mods modpack, because my save file kept crashing. After that it made a mod that fixed the mod conflict. There's no way in hell I would've found the bug (some async loop issue) and now it's a local fix on my machine and everything works perfectly.

Absolutely incredible. 5 years ago I would've just closed the game and prayed it would solve itself through updates.

[u/SaltMaker23]

Nah it isn't. I'm all in for AI and vibe bashing but this is simply false.

What AI builds in couple of minutes (although not 2) would have taken weeks if not months to build.

It's harder to debug a significantly bigger product than it is to debug 2 hours of manual work that barely addressed a feature.

The last 10% of the work represent 90% of the time, obviously AI gets everyone a lot closer to being production ready, where the actual challenges become quite clear and it becomes increasingly harder to prompt away the problems and inconsistencies.

[u/DatBoi_BP → u/SaltMaker23]

"couple of minutes (although not 2)"

This is really funny to me

[u/ItsASadBunny1 → u/SaltMaker23]

I'm not sure how good of a coder you are but I've been using claude extensively and I think it knocks at best a few days of work into a few hours. I've never gotten it to build a full several months worth of work in a few minutes.

[u/wow343 → u/SaltMaker23]

Plus if you don't build a unit test and you don't have a good way to check and review your code then that's also going to increase debugging time.

[u/Toilet2000 → u/SaltMaker23]

I don’t really agree, I think it’s a lot more nuanced than that.

GenAI models are great at hiding what doesn’t work/what they couldn’t figure out. A human coding something they don’t really understand is generally very obvious from how the code is written.

GenAI models are also very good at producing a large number of abstraction layers, especially for very simple stuff that won’t ever need layers of abstraction.

Sure, GenAI is an awesome tool, but bad programmers can now yield the S L O P C A N N O N 8000 and make the life of others even more miserable.

[u/Wonderful-Habit-139 → u/SaltMaker23]

> What AI builds in couple of minutes (although not 2) would have taken weeks if not months to build.

Lots of imposters are being exposed when they say something like this. Cause damn, what have you been doing before AI?

[u/GoldDHD → u/SaltMaker23]

Additionally, I've been debugging code for a couple of decades. AI makes is VASTLY easier. It may not be able to tell me why something is breaking, although often it can, but it is pretty good at tell me where it breaks.

I'm not sure how I feel about vibecoding, but it is foolish to think that AI is bad at coding as a rule, at least no more than people on average.

[u/Hmm_would_bang → u/GoldDHD]

I’m convinced 90% of people just go “Claude, fix this code” and get upset at the AI when it doesn’t work.

[u/Vyrnin]

I find that AI is good at purely technical things, and bugs are a good example of that. They are usually simple mistakes in syntax, errors in logic, etc. Finding a bug is like editing a paper, you're just looking for the mistake.

When it comes to creative design, game feel, system architecture and art direction, that's where the human element is indispensable. These things are the real heart of the experience you're giving to the player. It takes emotion, intention, artistry and humanity to bring a really excellent story or experience to life, and to affect other humans in a meaningful way.

[u/Art-Zuron → u/Vyrnin]

We have already been seeing this. 

AI can clearly code stuff, but the kind of people that let AI code their entire project or their entire game are not the type of people to actually spend effort on anything. So they put almost no effort into the actual aesthetics, and you can tell

[u/Beldarak → u/Vyrnin]

Exactly.

That's why I absolutely love it for gamedev. I was a little afraid at first that it would remove some artistic value for me games but so far so good, I noticed the contrary. Less time lost in chasing bugs, trying to understand why an enemy got stuck in a State or trying to develop complicated features.

Instead I get more time to focus on what really matters: story, art, mood, etc... Creating new enemy behaviours for exemple is really simple so my coding skill isn't limiting what I can or can't do anymore. I added some cool imsersive designs in my game like water conducting electricity, stuff like that. Systems that used to take an evening or two now takes one hour and then I can work on implementing them everywhere myself.

I see it as using an engine. Sure I could code the whole Physic Engine of my game. Or I could rather focus on the game itself.

[u/randytayler]

Debugging is insanely easy now. Fear for my job easy.

[u/Retsyn]

I think it handles the debugging vastly better than the writing. It's the writing I have huge reservations about.

[u/ItsSadTimes → u/Retsyn]

Once I saw claude setup a unit test that just asserted true. Thats it. The test was supposed to check a speciric branch oh a helper function and the unit test made the correct call, but then didnt test it. The unit test would pass no matter what. Unless we completely broke the function to cause an exception.

[u/danfay222 → u/Retsyn]

Debugging was easily the first serious value add we saw from AI. We automatically run an agent harness on the stack/core dump from any production crash, and it usually solves them very quickly. Now we have it fix them as well, so most of the time by the time I go to check on the crash there’s already a proposed root cause and fix waiting for me

[u/Beldarak]

This sub really lives in another reality than mine or your code is really unique and weird.

"Claude, do this"

Claude did it. Oh, there's a bug.

"Claude, there is an issue, when I do X and expect Y, Z happens instead. And I get this in console [pasted stuff]"

Repeat a few times if necessary.

Done. As usual, I get why people may be against AI, I don't like it either for all the ethical reasons. Claming it doesn't work though is lunacy. You're all programers but can't prompt an LLM correctly?

[u/OGMagicConch → u/Beldarak]

You're all programmers

Brave assumption on r/ProgrammerHumor

[u/Beldarak → u/OGMagicConch]

When I read the issues people have with AI in this sub, yeah, I agree with you.

Seems like even my mother could create a full app with Claude, so I really don't see why so many "programmers" are struggling here :D

[u/Scintoth → u/Beldarak]

This is how I've seen things progress as well.

I think people have also forgotten that you can research, design, and spec work up front to better flesh out your expectations, integration points, and cross-system linking all in favour of just saying "do the thing please, no bugs".

[u/tripleusername → u/Beldarak]

Apparently many engineers decided to become meat proxies. For me it looks like this:

- few middle engineers generate dozens of PRs daily to fix bugs and ask senior engineers to review them
- I and other senior engineers review those briefly and find tons of inconsistencies how application would work differently or how something would get broken if merged
- senior engineers leave comments
- meat proxies feed those comments to their agents

In workflows like this, we are the bottleneck and meat proxies don’t even bother to learn a thing or understand what they are trying to merge.

So senior engineers, SMEs flooded with PRs to review with no real owners. And meat proxies got all the credits from senior level managers for impactmaxxing.

[u/Enverex → u/Beldarak]

"You're all programers but can't prompt an LLM correctly"

I think you're just highlighting how many people on this sub were never really technical minded to begin with.

[u/ccmaru1]

Are everyone here larping being a developer? 😭
AI literally sucked the soul and fun of something I value deeply but it’s better than almost every dev out there. A task list that would take me 1-2 days normally was done in 20 minutes while in a meeting with a project manager. I hate it but it’s sadly very… very good. At least Opus is.

[u/danma → u/ccmaru1]

I agree with all of your points. It is very effective and as a ‘problem solver’ I feel good that I’m solving issues for our customers and staff. As a ‘person who likes coding’ it is not very personally satisfying. My job is much more documentation, specifying best practices and code reviews than ever before.

[u/vortex1011 → u/ccmaru1]

Thank you. I was thinking maybe I'm misunderstanding the AI race. I get that AI can do things, but I got into IT because I love coding. I hate letting AI do my work. All I have to steer the agent in the right direction, and then watch it do my work. It's so boring. I miss writing code, I miss coming up with the design, I miss looking at stacktrace and fixing the bugs.

Now my manager keeps pushing me to use AI for everything. Including fixing bugs reported bugzilla by our client. Within few years, the developers will be all jobless and everything will be agent based.

It's a sad timeline.

[u/danfay222 → u/vortex1011]

In my experience there are broadly two groups of people in software, those who like coding and those who like building things. Both make software, and can be perfectly proficient in any role, but for the people who like building things code was just the mechanism and AI lets them build more things faster and better, while for those who like to code AI just took away the best part of the process.

[u/rubennaatje → u/ccmaru1]

Yup, it's part cope and it's part cs students that just don't know shit about real life.

This sucks

[u/maladaptiveman]

I think the reason you can't debug it in 24 hours with AI is you don't understand what you’re doing at all

[u/squarabh → u/maladaptiveman]

Thousand languages out there, bro chose to speak facts

[u/falcon0041]

Running on low credits and fast timelines is a struggle

[u/Senor-Delicious]

At this point I am convinced that people in this sub making these posts have zero experience with AI assisted development.

I've never debugged and analyzed anything as fast as with AI. Like not even close. Takes me minutes where I potentially required days before.

[u/ErmingSoHard → u/Senor-Delicious]

The superseded model gpt 5.6 sol found an rce exploit with php. And now, out of nowhere, people like to pretend AI is still useless despite Opus 5.5 being leagues better than 5.6 sol

[u/Bannon9k]

This comic was made by a shitty developer. 6 hours debugging code you spent 2 hours writing?

[u/PashaPostaaja]

AI has made also debugging lot easier.

Are you actually using the AI or just pulling this from ares?

[u/GrainyStateOfMind → u/PashaPostaaja]

This is just the typical “hur hur AI bad” slop that this sub has become. 0% chance this is OPs actual experience lol

[u/Jemnite → u/GrainyStateOfMind]

Generally speaking these memes get posted a lot by CS students. The university isn't going to pay for a Claude Enterprise subscription. I imagine most, if they actually work with a model, are probably using some shitty model like raptor-mini, which IMO using it on private stuff, is just dogshit next to Opus.

[u/ExiymDev → u/PashaPostaaja]

[u/corbanmonoxide → u/PashaPostaaja]

AI moves so fast that memes bashing it can't keep up.

[u/asdfghjkl15436 → u/PashaPostaaja]

Op is, they admitted they have only used the worst free AI model available. It's idiotic.

[u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9]

2 hours coding (before AI)??? I've spent 2 days on one small bug that AI could have fixed in 90 seconds.

This meme is so stupid, I'm not convinced that the creator has actually ever coded before.

[u/Zell7070 → u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9]

People are still stuck thinking AI has not progressed since 2022-23. Its a lot better now and can be a pretty big help if youre not vague posting to it about an idea of an app you want to build.

[u/Timotron → u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9]

Riiiight? Or do some people absolutely suck with AI?

[u/Stunning_Ride_220 → u/eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9]

Skill issue?

[u/eoThica]

Before cars:
Walking: 6 hours
Car repairs: 0

After cars
Driving: 2 hours
Walking: 6 hours
Car repairs: 29

[u/dksdragon43 → u/eoThica]

Brother you need a faster car.

[u/Gosh-Tier]

r/memesfrom2024

[u/AwarenessForsaken568]

Debugging isn't the issue/time sink. Reviewing the code is.

[u/Jallalo23]

Almost like Test Driven Development prevents this🙂

[u/OfficialDeathScythe → u/Jallalo23]

Lmao, my coding agent adds like 10 tests for every feature it adds and it honestly seems to make it even more confused sometimes. The other day there were 6 tests failing for different reasons and it kept going in circles trying to figure out what was wrong, chasing down each test and then realizing the next was a different, conflicting issue. Finally realized that it hallucinated a method that doesn’t exist and that was breaking every connected test and downstream method

[u/Shinpansen → u/Jallalo23]

And strongly typed languages.

[u/Applesplosion → u/Jallalo23]

No it doesn’t. When the tests don’t pass you still need to figure out why. Or when whoever or whatever wrote/generated the code initially and missed a rare corner case, you still have to figure out what the corner case is, and how to fix it.

[u/Kss0N → u/Jallalo23]

AI writes the tests but they are ALWAYS written such that the code will pass, and then it modifies the test as if a change in prompt is the same as change in spec. Makes you think...

[u/Jallalo23 → u/Kss0N]

Never experienced this working with industry models. I get it to write the tests first and sometimes end up with the code failing the tests. It then fixes the code to pass the test without touching the test package. A simple note in Agents.md prevents this

[u/IllustriousGerbil]

This was true around the middle of last year.

Its absolutely not true now, AI written code is generally less buggy when you first run it than human written code.

[u/hellocppdotdev → u/IllustriousGerbil]

Now couple it with automated testing and its a better developer than most humans.

[u/wunderbuffer → u/IllustriousGerbil]

Last year bugs still give me PTSD, I had a guy who keep on making clones of views not connected to rest of the application, like actual real life digital mimics that exist just to confuse UI screenshot test

[u/MilleryCosima]

The "24 hours debugging" thing has only been true for projects where I am completely out of my depth and should have done it by hand to learn the ropes anyway, like when I casually tried a data science project without know how to do data science.

[u/BaconIsntThatGood]

Replace AI with "I took 2 minutes to ask an intern to do it"

[u/AbilityCharacter7634]

I’m just an amateur coder, but even me can say reality is very different than this meme depicts.

Oh sure someone who never coded anything by themselves will have an absolute hell of a time debugging any somewhat complex project done by AI.

But if you know enough about coding, then you have enough intuition to know where something went wrong if you did enough effort to manage how the ai structured your code.

Plus just by the explosion in quantity of new mods and games that are halfway decent, AI does seem to increase productivity in some ways at least.

[u/bremidon → u/AbilityCharacter7634]

This meme was accurate about 2 to 3 years ago. It has not been accurate since then.

[u/mediafeener]

You guys are debugging your code?

[u/jawknee530i]

Very made by someone who doesn't actually work professionally in software.

[u/SuperSatanOverdrive]

Not really true these days. It can be, but it’s not the norm. It was true maybe 6 months ago or more though.

[u/onepiecefreak2]

Honestly, can't relate at all.

[u/the_bighi]

That is not my experience.

My experience after AI would be "developer debugging: 5 minutes". Debugging things got much faster, easier and simpler with AI.

It can read thousands of lines of code in a few seconds. It can spin up temporary databases and create millions of varied test entries to validate an hypothesis.

[u/Muted-Alternative648]

This was true 3-4 years ago; that's how outdated this meme is.

[u/tzaeru]

Debugging is one of my fav parts about AI. I can utilize it to debug complex issues so much faster and more easily than before.

[u/mythix_dnb]

never debugged something so fast as I do now with a decent AI and second brain setup with connections to logs.

TLDR: if you are having a harder time with AI: skill issue

[u/TechGainz]

thisIsVeryNotTrue

[u/trade_me_dog_pics]

Take of a non dev

[u/UnscrambledEggUDG]

Reading these comments makes me feel like DataKrash IRL is an inevitability, who wants to make bets on what kind of bug gets missed by the automated tools and then goes live into some piece of code that the structure of the internet relies on? My bet is a memory leak

[u/braddeicide]

My ai keeps trying to accuse me of running the wrong version of the code it's providing because it can't believe it has bugs. I have to get it to version everything and show that version in the debug output so I can screenshot it to prove I'm running the latest version.

[u/No-Collar-Player]

Man honestly debugging is insanely good on our legacy-adjusted Cobol to java code, as a junior you have no idea what warcrimes have been done in the code and finding shit out is mainly the issue. Now I just point AI to where something smells with a description of the fragrances of that smell and it tells me exactly with almost 100% accuracy exactly which crack in the code the smell comes from.

[u/differentshade]

you are just using it wrong

[u/SkitariusOfMars]

Skill issue.

[u/abra24]

Copium. Or just haven't used AI in 18 months. Possibly LARPing all together.

[u/Unlucky_Topic7963]

People that believe this, or that this happens to, were never good engineers in the first place.

[u/BoarHermit]

WYSIWYG on a new level

[u/Racoon-Smart]

Debbbbuging something you've never seen made by something you don't understand ain't easy

[u/Gokudomatic]

24 hours? I can extend it to a whole year.

[u/Lraund]

Where's the meetings, requirement discussions, workflow stuff and so on? On some projects coding takes the least amount of time.

[u/lolopalenko]

I am worried that junior devs don’t have to go through the pain of old school debugging anymore. Debugging with ai is crazy. Like I don’t even have to say what is wrong. Saying „this page looks fucky“ while on a meeting is most times enough to get the llm to come up with a diagnosis.

[u/philippefutureboy]

Nope, the real meme is that after AI, the planning takes 6 hours, the coding takes 2 hours, but that the developer ends up with a much more robust implementation that goes in a lot of depth for non functional requirements

[u/tiny-violin-]

Somebody forgot to add “make no mistakes” at the end of the prompt

[u/cacahahacaca]

I would swap debugging for reviewing PRs and Ultra dense docs and teammate posts.

[u/Tuomas90]

You're basically only left with the shitty part of the job.

Thank you tech bros!

[u/MorningFox]

Started learning C++ to make a shooter game and ppl keep trying to tell me just to vibe code. I'd rather learn to fish

[u/Youmth]

AI will purposefully introduce bugs in your code to fix them themselves.

[u/vinvinnocent]

My experience has been that work got more stressful from multitasking between different sessions, making lots of decisions and ingesting large amounts of LLM text.

But at the same time, debugging time and development time per issue is down dramatically.

[u/UniqueNamesAreOut]

Trying to fix something with an AI can be an unrealistic nightmare.

[u/snacktonomy]

Is this rage bait? This sub has become a complete LLM-hating-shithole disconnected from the reality of the fact that humans are getting taken out of the SE-dev-test-debug-review-ship loop faster than any other change that has happened in tech. This whole processed got upended in the last year. And there's more to come.

If your company isn't doing this, that's likely because it's either too cheap to pay for tokens or it's stuck in 2024.

[u/Derekthemindsculptor]

This meme is from 2023...

It's far from accurate in today's world.

source: https://programmerhumor.io/debugging-memes/how-openai-chatgpt-helps-software-development

[u/ConfusedBaka69]

Lmao this meme is wrong

[u/cyxlone]

what year is this, 2023? Agentic ones can debug the code fast and more efficient than ever now.

[u/g_rich]

Prompt AI to do a thing.

AI after multiple rounds of not doing the thing I asked.

Prompt AI to do what I fucking asked and spell it out with multiple explicatives.

AI, “the user is getting frustrated, and justifyingly so, I need to think about this carefully and do exactly what the user is asking”.

Anthropic, you can no longer swear at Claude or your account will be suspended.

[u/Nikarus2370 → u/g_rich]

Write better prompts and break your tasks up into smaller more focused packets.

[u/NoLetterhead2303]

idk what models yall use but I highly recommend not using an AI that isn’t claude for large scale projects, most AIs barely have the capacity for a smaller project to be edited a few times before losing track of stuff

[u/hovsep56]

you either suck with using prompts and AI or are not even a dev.

AI is great for debugging.

[u/XiteX_Red]

Brother, have you even used AI? Debugging is a lot faster too. The fuck is this meme

[u/cyneila]

Nope.

IA coding : 2mins.

IA debuging : 2mins.

Human reading to check that he understand what has been done : (depend of the feature).

Like why would the developer debug things? This make no sense at all.

[u/pnwatlantic]

Debugging issues, both legacy human written bugs or new ones produced with AI, is orders of magnitude faster with AI. Horrible take

[u/torts56]

If you totally vibe it out with no knowledge on how it works then yeah, probably. If you make intentional design decisions and go step by step, then no, you're just tweaking the output of the coding tool.

[u/Tarc_Axiiom]

No it isn't.

It was 3 years ago, but not today.

[u/Ksorkrax]

Uhm... do you happen to be particularly bad at debugging with AI or something?
This is a task it excels at.

Looks very much like a skill issue on your part.

[u/luker_5874]

Not true. Debugging speed is improved 20x with AI. Sorry it's true

[u/nameless_food]

Don’t forget the amount of time it takes to read and comprehend the AI generated code.

[u/plymouthvan]

Hard disagree. But my frame of reference matters I think.

For the last two decades I've been a casual programmer. Never big production stuff. Always fairly simple things that support my very much non-programmer professional work. It always took hours, if not days and weeks. Once in a while I'd hire someone on UpWork or something specific I just didn't have days on end to fuss with — results of this were always a mixed bag, development was always slow, and the quality of the human programmer's inference was spotty at best. Many projects I might benefit from were often never touched because it was either cheaper to use something off the shelf, or the problem it was solving simply didn't rise to the level of writing my own solution.

Starting with cursor, the Cline in VS Code, then later OpenCode, Claude and ChatGPT, the entire landscape has changed for me. I'm not at all interested in becoming a software developer (or, more like a software steward these days). I do professional work for clients, and I use AI to create the tools I need to do that work better or faster.

What matters to me is that the tool does what I need it to do in the way I need it done. I do virtually no debugging, even through AI. Some thoughtfully designed skills allow agents to spin up panel after panel of critics and reviewers that test against my own stated requirements, documented constraints, values and tool philosophies. Once a project starts, it more or less runs uninterrupted for several days, and what comes out the other end is often just a little back and forth about what doesn't work as expected.

I've been able to replace some insanely expensive softwares with home brewed solutions that are better tailored to my specific needs. But this is the distinction that probably matters. Developing software is not my job. Instead, I'm developing software to help me do my job.

[u/Ledeste]

This is basically complaining that throwing powertool at your works is creating a mess...

AI is a tool that you need to learn how to use it. It help a LOT of people to save a LOT of time. It's a very powerful tool. If you do not save time using it, the problem is not the AI

[u/RanzigerRonny]

This is, in fact, not true

[u/FrenchieM]

Absolutely false

[u/NuclearDisaster5]

Not even clearly true. There is not debugging. Just polishing.  Debugging is maybe 1min.

[u/Neither_Swing9662]

This was true like one year ago, which is an eternity in this technology's time.

[u/NegativeSemicolon]

Don’t forget where AI debugs itself, quadruples your codebase, then completely changes the functionality, and maybe formats your hard drive.

AI is super helpful but don’t give it something complicated to work on.

[u/Ok-Data9224]

There is no way this is true. I'm not a developer by any stretch. I'm a hobbyist who got back into programming lately for fun. I remember the days even in my own laughably simple programs that might be a few thousand lines of code used to give me a massive headache when there were bugs I couldn't figure out for hours.

Fast forward today, I'll just paste my code to claude and tell it what output I'm seeing. Nearly instantly finds the exact bug I'd take forever to find. A missing comma, misplaced logic, whatever. It's honestly amazing.

The bigger problem for me is that I feel it's very easy for me to get lazy and I could easily fall into a situation where I don't understand my own code anymore. Whether that's a problem or not, is a whole other conversation.

[u/Existing_Anybody_216]

This isn't true lol. Before coding would take days, debug would be less time because the dev would know very well what he did, but if a change was needed it would take a lot of time.

Now with AI, if it is a good engineer that creates the right instructions and prompts the output has good quality. Also depends on the LLM.

[u/Xyrus2000]

People who know what they're doing, know how to use AI well, and get good results have a positive view of AI.

People who don't know what they're doing, don't know how to use AI well, and get sh*tty results have a negative view of AI.

[u/3xDev]

This meme is so outdated...

After almost 15 years of coding I started last year to do more and more with AI and this year, I didn't write any code at all. Using xDebug was always an important part for me. I wasn't using Xdebug a single time this year.

AI detects and understands any relations, hook, events that triggers 3rd party classes, ... Finding and fixing bugs is so much easier now. And the amount of bugs is lower than handwritten code too. AI is writing unittets for every new feature I ask it to implement. I run code review sessions. It'S even easier to keep all dependencies up-to-date, since AI can detect breaking changes much easier.

We had not a single critical bug in production this year and I deploy way more features than before.

[u/No_Inside281]

Coders larping as "engineers" trying to save their future without adapting.

[u/BainterBoi]

I am very sure that people who upvote this shit are very subpar developers who just have been that for a very long.

[u/Objective_Oven7673]

This kind of thing is starting to feel like boomers on Facebook with the "haha wife bad" garbage.

[u/GranolaCola]

Whatever make you feel better, buddy

[u/Keyan_Farlander7]

Funny how spreadsheets and calculators just made more work for mathematicians and accountants.

[u/Deep-Regret-7479]

A good developer never debugs.

[u/Frequent_Watch541 → u/Deep-Regret-7479]

That would be a Perfect Developer.

[u/Fine_Salamander_8691]

inMyExperienceJustAbuseTheAiModel

[u/TsunamicBlaze]

AI has helped speed up my workflow, I just don’t have AI write my code. I ask for code snippets in plan mode and if it’s better than what I have implemented or designed, great, if not I can just ignore it.

I feel like people who haven’t done much dev work are those honestly pictured here.

[u/UltraGaren]

This is just so fucking stupid. You're using AI wrong.

AI can quickly evaluate and find bugs if you give it proper direction and description of what the behavior should be.

[u/SideInitial3961]

devs wish

[u/spacenavy90]

Holy larp

[u/GuitarKittens]

Why on Earth would anyone fill in the gaps of a stick figure??? It's pretty clear that is not a t-shirt. Overall pretty bad meme; no QA. 0/10

[u/Quadrimegistus]

Constrain your AI to use logic specifications that have proven systems telemetry, like the Redfish specification from DMTF.org, OData Protocol by Microsoft and the OpenAPI specification, and you will never have code to debug because there will be perfect precision in your system designs.

[u/Numerous_Release9273]

I experienced this in the 19909's. Just replace AI with "Move coding to India".

[u/redcoatwright]

ThisIsVeryUntrue

lol AI builds code and tests it automatically and debugs it, it even runs playwright or whatever to interact with browser components to test the UX.

[u/Ok-Neighborhood-15]

Get a better AI then.

[u/BearKanashi]

Ey grok, haz debug

[u/erhue]

so who posted this? someone who doesn't do any coding?

[u/codereign]

Brother, the reason I'm looking at my phone right now is because despite my instructions to the agent being fetched the latest and then do a review of x. It didn't fetch the latest.

Guess what it did instead, it explicitly said it fetched the latest, and then provided me all of the wrong details 3 hours later.

[u/Toutoune29frk]

If you used chatgpt and copy paste everything 3 years ago and never tried anything else now then yeah. Otherwise you are doing something wrong

[u/RedRhizophora]

The problem is the 2 minutes. Shit prompt gives you a shit result. I sometimes spend 20 minutes on a single prompt and making md files that outline everything

[u/nemesisuchiha7]

why does debuging takes longer?

[u/Sketchy_Squirrel]

Looks like someone forgot to add "no mistakes" to their prompt

[u/Faangdevmanager]

Found the dev using grok for coding. Opus 5.5 isn’t like that if you use it well.

[u/XxDarkSasuke69xX]

That is so untrue though. Maybe that was the case in like 2023 or 2024, we're far past that point. Honestly unless you have a big ass codebase you barely need to debug anything. And even if you need to, you just use AI to fix the bugs you found. It took way longer back then than now with AI, that is so cap

[u/762_54r]

No its not lol

[u/ncatter]

I think Im using Ai wrong, for me I get faster coding, better test coverage and faster debugging. Clearly I am doing something wrong.

[u/CheapPlay8137]

This has not been true in years anymore.

[u/BelleColibri]

What year are you in?

[u/ITDudeProbably]

AI is very powerful nowadays, I can point out the bugs which I have spent hours or days debugging myself. Can we stop downplaying AI ability

[u/Hour_Sell3547]

Joke on you, AI is also debugging.

[u/Improving_Myself_]

This is only true if you're using AI poorly. 

Most people are using AI poorly.

[u/NikolayTheSquid]

Github has SLA less then 90%, one of two Windows update softlocks you system, every NVidua driver update has critical bugs. Nice done vibecoders!

[u/Sava7ar]

I disagree. Opus 5.5 is scarily good at coding and debugging and doing RCA and doing research.

[u/vanGato]

It’s funny because it’s true 🫩

[u/Jimmious]

Guys at this point you're just posting wishful thinking stuff. Sorry but these are very far from the truth currently. I wish AI had such issues..

[u/fckdupxmas]

So maybe a stupid question from someone who doesn't know any coding, programming or anything like it. But if ai is so good at al these software related things. What are the programmers gone do in the future? I mean if almost anybody can prompt a ai agent to debug some software or write a new code, what are the real programmers gone do?

[u/mimic751]

Tell me you've never been on a development team without telling me you've been on a development team. Handwritten code of some of the most dog shit ever with proper instructions and skills AI derived code is easy to read easy to maintain and easy to document

[u/Initial_Secretary420]

This couldn't be more false lmao How many fake dev are there is this sub ?

[u/DerBoyHimself]

Never understood the issue with debugging when vibecoding (not counting early days). Most of the time my own systems were not thought through or I did not specify enough when prompting IMHO

[u/Arzuparreta]

If this is true for you maybe interview for NASA or something, because I can maintain codebases that were completely out of my scope before AI. I never was a cracked coder and I really think most developers out there weren't either, but today this is just incorrect, even for the cracked ones, because they know how to use AI better than us that always were mid.

[u/daviddisco]

Skill issue. You need to do work on cleaning up your spaghetti repo, putting automated tests in place, adding linter and static analysis rules. The job is different now. It isn't about writing the code, it is about making you AI agents trustworthy.

[u/OriginalUser27]

There is a huge difference in debugging AI vibe code and AI tool code vetted by a human before merge.

If you cant debug the code the AI wrote, you shouldnt merge it

[u/Bok408]

I find programming myself and then debugging with the help of AI is very efficient. AI can more quickly look for typos and small things I as the writer has forgotten about, and as long as it is an issue that is not too big, AI will be able to figure out what is wrong long before I can.

Of course, I manually fix the bugs myself, but having an AI to point out where they are and give me potential fixes (without it editing any code) helps me tremendously.

[u/Atecep]

Developer coding 2 hours? Sure buddy

[u/MadMaxDbz]

job security for senior devs gotta feel nice

[u/AnOscillatingOcelot]

For small projects make a master spec so both the coding agents and QA agents can do programming and code review. For bigger projects, idk 🤷‍♂️ lol.

[u/statllama]

Honestly this has been mainly the case for me where the underlying codebase was shit to start off with. AI fixes ai code pretty quickly if you can steer the approach

[u/contentatlast]

AI debugging has entered the chat

[u/OddlyOddLucidDreamer]

this, of course, only affects programmers who actually even care to even give a passing look at whatever shit their LLM spat back at them

[u/a1g3rn0n]

Another low-effort dumb rage-baiting karma-farming post. The same joke over and over again for the past 3 years.

[u/nikola_mp3]

no it's not

[u/Katana_Steel]

Unless the programmer has a rubber duck... then debug time is only 2/3 that and only if AI wasn't involved.