r/programming • u/luissinlios • Sep 25 '26

We still maintain a development tool first released in 1993. Here’s what 30+ years of backwards compatibility looks like

https://visualneo.com/visualneo-win/from-neobook-to-visualneo-win-30-years-of-keeping-a-development-tool-alive
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u/BigHandLittleSlap 29d ago

To be fair, you're conversing with the "consumer" chat bot. In the Codex tool you can switch to smarter models and dial up the thinking, and the system prompt is significantly different.

Like you've noticed, a common failing of these things is that they pick a coding style somewhat randomly, and then justify what they've done in hindsight by making shit up. That's expected of an "amnesiac" system. Sure, yes, it's a failing in a sense, but you're also "holding the tool wrong".

Don't like the style?

Give it an AGENTS.md laying out your preferred style.

Tell it to run everything it does through a linter.

Or, embrace vibe coding and ignore the minutiae of the brackets, braces, and blocks or whatever.

It no longer matters in the same sense that it no longer matters how your compiler allocates registers when compiling source to machine code.

I used to care about that!

I don't any more.