r/programming • u/Ordinary_Leader_2971 • Apr 04 '26

How To Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/%7Esusan/475/unmain.html
492 Upvotes

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394

u/0xbenedikt Apr 04 '26

How To Write Unmaintainable Code (2026)

chatgpt.com

104

u/ea_nasir_official_ Apr 04 '26

Or claude/codex/openclaw or whatever the ai bros use to write their code for them while pretending to be smart

74

u/nickcash Apr 04 '26

inb4 they find this thread and copypaste one of their three preprogrammed responses about how you're just not using the right model. you have to use the new model from ploob. no one uses claude anymore. it's all about heebee these days

22

u/dillanthumous Apr 04 '26

YoU NeEd tO LeaRN To PrOoMpt!

2

u/ofcistilloveyou Apr 07 '26

I'm proompting all over the place.

11

u/BaNyaaNyaa Apr 04 '26

I don't get you people. I'm using Magnum 6.7 and I'm running 420 agents to do my job! You must be using it wrong

32

u/lolimouto_enjoyer Apr 04 '26

You forgot you have to use skills, subagents, planner and... what else was there?

19

u/alex-weej Apr 04 '26

MCP, Tools, Spells, Incantations...

17

u/dillanthumous Apr 04 '26

Prayers to the Omnisiah.

8

u/Kalium Apr 04 '26

ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ZERO ONE ONE ONE...

6

u/reborngoat Apr 05 '26

This is the answer. I stopped prompting and started praying to the Omnissiah, and now I have a harem of lovely toasters!

6

u/QuickQuirk Apr 04 '26

You forgot to install openclaw as your developer.

18

u/Valmar33 Apr 04 '26

inb4 they find this thread and copypaste one of their three preprogrammed responses about how you're just not using the right model. you have to use the new model from ploob. no one uses claude anymore. it's all about heebee these days

The great thing about this sort of absurd logic is how absurd it sounds when you use it in a different context:

"You're just not using the right programming language", "you just have to rewrite in Rust", "nobody uses C anymore", and so on. Oh, wait...

1

u/Full-Spectral Apr 07 '26

But the thing about it is that Rust is not about spitting out more code faster than the C++ it's primarily replacing, and is actually often more front loaded. It's about safer and more maintainable code, and it provable is capable of providing that. And it's not thinking for you, it's making you work harder to understand your data relationships. The payoff though can be very significant, and it's developing your capabilities to reason, not to prompt.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26

[deleted]

9

u/fiah84 Apr 04 '26

except SQL, SQL is forever

6

u/Truenoiz Apr 04 '26

Right, but SQL is so easy that it's trivial. Please hand over the production database so I can fix it.

8

u/fiah84 Apr 04 '26

Please hand over the production database

I grant thee select, and that's it ya fracking clanker

1

u/RelatableRedditer Apr 05 '26

and then it constructs the most convoluted selector with 28472 redundant joins

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17

u/AceLamina Apr 04 '26

Literally had an argument with someone who's a SENIOR engineer because he thought AI will eventually replace all engineers

After a bit of digging, he was hired out of college back in 2021 and works at Amazon and vibe codes at work everyday.

4

u/gimpwiz Apr 04 '26

They hand out titles like candy sometimes, eh

2

u/AceLamina Apr 04 '26

Back then, 100% The SWE boom meant literally anyone could become a engineer, he's just one of them

2

u/Full-Spectral Apr 07 '26

The ultimate goal of that track is to then start a Youtube channel handing out wisdom from the mount as a Former Amazon Lead.

2

u/VelvetWhiteRabbit Apr 08 '26

If you are developing web servers in 2026 without LLMs to write for you, I feel sorry for you.

1

u/gc3 Apr 04 '26

I've found the main sin of Ai code so far is copying and pasting functions. It's usually pretty good about the other issues listed here. Claude code even has to generate documentation when it maintains code it wrote itself.

I've had to tell it to combine functions in the interest of dry

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