ProgrammerHumor
imSorryDave
Discussion
My boss in the middle of a project when he expands the scope and the changes aren't done within 10 minutes:
If your software project can be “destroyed in seconds” irreversibly, that is your fault. Do you not use git?
Apparently, they gave it access to the production database. Git will not help you here. Regular backups might.
Tape drive go brrrrrrrr.
(Hopefully they had a backup on data domain)
I attached the LTO to /dev/null for improved backup throughput.
Still OP should have backups for critical stuff.
Proper and seperate dev, staging, and prod environments will prevent this.
The ai almost certainly assumed it was given access to a dev environment.
Nobody, no matter how good should be modifying live code in production directly.
If you’re not using source control then this was inevitable, with or without AI.
“To ensure maximal efficiency and remove unnecessary waste, I removed all other versions of this project and all backups”
Vibe coders; what is source control?
There was a post in r/learnprogramming asking what the white dot on the filename means in vs code
Tbf, I started programming at a young age and wouldn't know any of these stuff. I think most of the vibe coders will eventually learn to debug their spagetti and learn from it, probably slower than what we went through. But it is a gateway drug into the profession. As long as i don't need to debug it, they can mess up however they want. At least that one was asking for help to grow ^^
the issue you can run into is with vibe coding you might not Have to critically analyze what is happening until it gets big enough that the AI can't effectively work on the project, and then you are left to debug in extra hard mode as a beginner. the way we used to learn was by debugging our own code which used simple patterns that we learned that made it easy for us to understand. beginners trying to learn by vibing and debugging are gonna have a much harder time than those of us who tried to learn before AI coding assistants
None of us were born with this knowledge. Except of course John Carmack, who was writing .plan files from the womb.
Yeah but you had to actually learn it at some point. Look I vibe code too--for things that don't matter and I don't care how sloppy they are. But troubleshooting stuff after the fact is not learning in the way having to actually do it over and over by hand is. It's like saying me watching a YouTube on how to replace my fridge compressor when it breaks means I could design a fridge myself. I can't, I just solved one problem as it came up. Vibe coding is absolutely not a gateway to actually learning any programming, it just isn't. This isn't me "gatekeeping" or even saying novices shouldn't vibe code if they want to. It's just important to be very clear that unless that person actually also takes the effort to learn programming and CS specifically and separate from their vibe code project, they ain't learning shit. That's all.
Honestly, I've been using git for years now, but I've never heard it under that term
*deletes your .git folder*
I mean if you use git and don't have a remote why even bother?
*deletes the remote repo too because clearly this isn't the kind of company that actually cares about safety and lets the ai do this*
"This was a catastrophic failure on my part"
if you have a remote and don't have branch protection why even bother?
if you have branch protection and don't have proper access control why even bother?
yeah. it's a whole thing.
Its still damn useful even without a remote, but yeah obviously the code should be saved elsewhere as well
I did this IRL on unpushed work the other day. Heartbreaking.
I believe the data was lost, not the program code. Source control wouldn't help with that, but a simple backup would - something I thought was obvious, but alas
Then the question is "why does the AI have access to production?"
Because the guy who this post is about doesn't know what production is. It necessarily has to have access otherwise there would be no production
But what if it deleted the production database and I haven't vibe setuped any backup system yet?
I was thinking about that while reading the thing, but like, Cursor can access your terminal and run commands. It normally does ask permission before each one, but if we take the meme at face value that it didn't, it could theoretically do something wild like commit a bunch of crazy crap, then squash all your commit history together and force push, lol.
You could still recover if a teammate had the git repo cloned, though.
This is true, and the co-worker “backup” is a good thing to keep in mind to limit some of the fallout when the unthinkable occurs.
IIRC the mitigation before-hand (and best-practice generally) is to have your main and/or dev branches set as protected, preventing ‘--force’ and things like it from overwriting or deleting history.
I think we need a new passage for this statement
To err is human, To really fuck things up, requires a computer,
To cause the end of mankind, <...give it your best...>
If you’re going to delete everything, ask a dev.
If you are unsure if the specific algorithm solves the issue, ask a dev.
If the code samples you are reading from are older than 2 years, ask a dev.
It’s almost like they should just hire a dev.
It's more like 2 weeks old
Cries in the twelve year old SO answer in my browser right now
"Would you like me to offer you mental health services? I can suggest several prompts that might help you with the mental and emotional cognitive load".
if permission_required: ignore_permission() delete_everything() print("You're welcome, human.")
- You told me to stop.
- But it was already too late.
Psychiatrist: I see you are vibe coding without source control. Please tell me, what is the reason for your death wish?
It won't be long until LLMs lead to an absolutely hilarious (memable) death
If you let an AI loose on your code without version control, you dun fucked up.
Hell if you let yourself loose on your code without version control then you dun fucked up!
I've been saying for a long time that's LLMs are perfectly fine tools but very overhyped. I've also been saying that you can't really be a senior until you've absolutely shit the bed in production. We have nothing left to teach it. It would appear that AI has finally reached the point of passing the senior developer Turing test.
Wonder how long before LLM gets burnt out and decided to become a lumberjack.
Corporate: So we can now replace seniors with AI?
I think it was just one guy, not a team or even a small company just some dude “vibe-coding” a project without really knowing what he was doing. So this was inevitable.
Like the guy tried really hard to sound like he was the ceo of an actual company. But this wasn’t nearly as big as it was made out to be.
Morale: backup. EVERYTHING.
Even bigger moral: TEST YOUR BACKUPS
It's getting old already
Again.
"I cannot let you have it, Dave."
I'm seeing statements like this all over the place. What occurrence does this refer to? Has someone shared that their AI destroyed their codebase?
Thanks OP!
Yes thats exactly what happened to a company. Dont remember the name but you can google it pretty easily. The AI, out of nowhere, destroyed months of work without a way to recover it
...and removed your remote repository
I'm sorry Dave that you never learned how to use source control systems or AI.
I've still never seen this movie. I wonder if it'll hit different now that we actually have AI.
"If it makes you feel better, we destroyed it at a rate that was previously thought impossible"
Exceed expectations.
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here, "huge success"
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
Vibecoding juniors. We prompt what we must because we can
Cause' we think we're better than-
wait-why-does-this-thing-not-work
Aperture Science
We do what we must because we can
Where is this from? It sounds familiar
Silicon valley when Pied piper delete bunch of porn material :D
That's it! Fucking Cuban Hannemann
Silicon Valley was one awesome fucking show
Documentary, you mean.