- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Great! Software isn’t bloated, convoluted, incomprehensible, fragile enough already!
Managers about to find out the hard way that all the requirements are in the brains of those they laid off.
I’m sure coding bootcamp and AI will turn them into leet hax0rs.
I feel this in my bones. Even before the recent round of restructuring we’ve had a significant about of turnover. Our infrastructure is a massive rube golberg machine with multiple houses of cards built on top of it. Institutional knowledge was never written down and it has been leaving the company at an accelerating rate over the past 5 years. Tons of “new blood” making lots of assumptions on how things work is resulting in… humorous end results.
Definitely happening at at least one major company I’m familiar with.
Requirements and everything else.
A highly respected school teacher of mine was known to say, “Say what you mean; mean what you say.”
This is really one of the best advice about communication ever.
No, the customer wants a button that does a very specific thing.
He can’t tell you what that is, though. You’re the expert!
Also, can you put in more ads? And make it so the users can’t close the tab until they bought something.make it so the users can’t close the tab until they bought something.
Why do they always request that? They’ve never seen any website on the internet work like that yet they actually think that they are the first people to come up with that idea.
You’re the expert!
I can do absolutely anything. I’m an expert!
Stupid PM. Forgot to say the button needs to be corn-flower blue.
Make pop.
The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3
Needs more AI to randomly guess what the columns might be
Do we have the same client?
Everyone has and is that client.
Yeah but when I’m like that it’s justified
Or headers. Just unlabeled data in a CSV.
I love how this is a universal experience.
Jesus, this gave me war flashbacks.
Please, do elaborate. Let others feast on your suffering.
May I?
A controlling department wasn’t granted any money for digitializing their workflow.
So these guys created their own solution(s!). Things like dedicated “user interfaces” loading data from tables created by hand. After years these people realized that data formatting is quite the issue.
They started to put random rules into different tables:
Two empty lines: New Group Data Record. One empty line: New Subgroup Data Record.
Excel tables aggregating this data via hardcoded links.
A dedicated table to start calculations on parent tables.
They mutated data like this:
Load data from excel files into one. Manually delete, add or change lines (or columns). Start a collection run from dedicated excel file and load new excel file data and replace old excel file data.
They had files where ‘it was easier to read’ when they pivot the data. This was troublesome since some values are intermediate results. Dropping one column may imply dropping another one as well.
All workflows required manual alignments along the way.
They were only able to process 10% of the data from a year within a year. Managing millions in cash.
Their data input came from different internal sources. Programs which were written two decades ago once and without any tests. Talking like VB, macro’s from host servers and copy-pasta data from other internal programs.
And don’t get me started on customer tables… They created a zip-code encoded filesystem hierarchy where each customer data (you guessed it, excel file) was renamed and then saved. In each of these directories where randomly named files if something went wrong; So no actual file patterns to rely on.
I respect them.
They creates a diagram for their tables with word. Word! (Didn’t know either: you can select the web view in the bottom right corner and you get an infitive canvas…) Madness.
Holy cow :O
I had a potential client, an accountant. They had their own, uh, system within a spreadsheet. They wanted me to program another system to be able to send their spreadsheet output into our governments IRS. Did a little back-and-forth but could not convince them to drop the idea.
Strangely enough we actually solved this problem with AI a few months back. We upload the excel file to Gemini and have a prompt to extract the data we need in a specific json format. And it works surprisingly well.
How well? Bet your life on it well, or “fewer hallucinations than we would have guessed” well? I’ve considered and toyed around with openAI models for logging supply room check offs in a JSON format and it went better than I hoped but worse than I needed.
The second one. It is always the second one.
Really well. Temp turned down all the way, and Gemini has this new feature to run and execute code… Not function calling… It can write a small python script, run it and return the output.
So our prompt explains the excel spreadsheet, then tell it exactly the format we need it in, and then tell it to use python and pandas to read in the CSV, clean it up and reshape it the way we need it to match what we expect and voila.
So hallucinations are not really and issue with the data as it’s simply writing code which then deterministically processes and returns the data.
Edit to add more info: basically Gemini can create and run a lambda function on the fly. And if you’re a coder you can really guide the prompt. Eg "load this into pandas. Then remove all the empty columns. Also remove the total rows. Now unpivot the data so the months are not columns but in separate rows with a column called month.
You get the idea.
Google thanks you for your data.
Holy smokes, how did I not think to turn the temperature down?! That’s smart! Thanks for getting back to me!
It would still have to be in at least somewhat of a consistent format. Even a human would require that.
If they’re just going to write the details however they feel on any particular day and then just expect someone or something to be able to interpret that they’re going to have a bad time.
“Y’know, I’ve been thinking… The app is missing a couple of things, like This, and That, and it should also do This after That, but not That after This, and maybe even navigate to The Other Thing after 3 Launch events, while also not doing that if the user is under a Pisces moon in the 4th Year of Wilting…”
“So… you want a Rate the App pop-up with specific trigger conditions?”
“What?! No! I want one of those prompts with the stars and the redirect to the Store which lets people post reviews of the app, what are you even talking about?!”
AI Junior Dev: short-circuits
It wouldn’t short circuit, it would just say “OK, no problem!” and then output bullshit.
AI:
This is when the AI, in a microsecond, decided to destroy the human race.
Not gonna lie, I don’t really blame the AI.
This is why we definitely shouldn’t rewrite the nuclear launch software. A project manager could unintentionally push a programmer into justifiably ending the fucking planet.
That’s when you load all middle managers onto a spaceship and send them off under the guise of colonising a new world.
Whoa whoa, hold on there! You can’t expect a product manager to come up with such detailed specs!
I had a client once explain to me that his request for the 75% redesign of his mobile app would be simple because “it’s just 3 pages”
That was the exact quote
I know that was hardly related to the post, but it reminded me of that and I needed to vent to my therapist (aka strangers on Lemmy)
I feel you. Just ended coding “a little special case” that resulted in dozens of files changed, all because I refused to make it with dirty hidden hack, and that was a clear-cut technical if-branching even, no vague ideas
Talking to a client is times that amount of hurdle
The DWIM button.
Coming soon after the Neuralink implant.
AI can’t replace programmers right now, but I’ve said all through my software dev career that our ultimate goal is to eliminate our jobs. Software will eventually be able to understand human language and think of all the right questions to ask to turn “Customer wants a button that does something” into an actual spec that generates fully usable code. It’s just a matter of time. Mocking AI based on what it currently can’t do is like mocking airplanes because of what they couldn’t do in the 1920s.
Or like mocking Moon colonization in 1970
I had a number of points to discuss, but they pale before this:
Software will eventually be able to understand human language
First, someone surely must have tried to code it, but I never heard of any system like that. Second and more important: anyone understands how we understand? And how the distance between understanding and communicating is covered? Someone? Anyone?
And before some smart person tries for the thousand’s time this “but computers will get bettah” shit of argument: even with the whole task of putting it to code aside, we know shit about how we think, understand and speak, that’s coming from me having Master’s degree in linguistics
Yes, the main problem with developing AI is that we really don’t understand how we think. Current AI doesn’t understand anything, it just imitates human output by processing a vast amount of existing output. But we do know a lot more now about how we think, understand and speak than we did a hundred years ago, and as a linguist you know this work isn’t standing still,. Compare it with genetics - 70 years ago we didn’t even know about DNA, and now we can splice genes. The fact that there’s still a lot of baseline work to do shouldn’t cast doubt on the goal, should it?
Oh yes it should. We have spent thousands of years looking at these things, and look where we are
For almost all of those thousands of years, no tools existed to analyze the actual mechanics of brain function. The development of all sciences has been exponential in the last couple centuries. I’ll be here if you decide you want to converse like someone with a master’s degree instead of a mediocre high school student scrolling lemmy on the toilet.
Lol. Good luck, mister exponential science
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Is it?
I’m checking the comments to be sure, as I also get a slight “AI-feel” from this meme.
AI slop image, for this gag?
