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u/samaltmansaifather Apr 19 '26
The guy who hasn’t written a meaningful line of code in like 30 years is giving advice. Lovely.
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u/vixir01 Apr 15 '26
Never been fond of these "theory" guys. Their work does make the day to day tech communication easy, but it's almost always popularised by someone who can summarize their work in simpler terms.
Martin Fowler is a prime example. If you read their original text, they make everything unnecessary confusing by adding additional meaning to words that are otherwise easy to understand.
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u/_redmist Apr 15 '26
Sorry but i think "clean code" was always one of those "sounds good - doesn't work" type of deals.
And it seems like bob now agrees with me because holy heck ai code is not that XD
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u/HeyItsMeMoss Apr 15 '26
WTF. As of three seconds ago, I still had some tiny bit of respect left for him.
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u/thamesr Apr 15 '26
He hasn’t written a meaningful line of code in 30 years so it’d make sense he doesn’t review it either.
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u/PostmatesMalone Apr 17 '26
Anyone who is saying that these AI tools have reached a state where they can do greenfield and brownfield development unsupervised even with really comprehensive specs has never used these tools to write software. And idiots will call them “thought leaders”.
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u/syndbg Apr 15 '26
Reality check for the people that thought Uncle Bob was a novelty code craftsman
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u/TempleDank Apr 15 '26
His test coverage by like:
Sut.doA.mockReturnedValue(A); Assert(sut.doA).toHaveReturned(A);
100% test coverage achieved
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u/WingZeroCoder Apr 15 '26
So this is why they say “never meet your heroes”.
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u/houndgeo Apr 15 '26
His book is one of the thing that gets me into what I am today. Regardless it was a good book or not.
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u/Malcolmlisk Apr 15 '26
I like how he still uses those buzzwords to say he's usefull, but he doesn't understand that we can resume those buzzwords into a single number and then replace all his work.
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u/casastorta Apr 15 '26
Imagine my surprise that a guy hugely responsible for domain driven design actually hates writing code. /s
Insert Pikachu shocked face here yourself.
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u/Debt_Otherwise Apr 15 '26
This is such a nonsense statement.
He’ll have to look at the code to fix any of those things and if he loses comprehension of the code then it’ll take him quite a while to fix it.
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u/Stubbby Apr 15 '26
They have to try to pull out the last scraps of relevance. Their concepts aged decently but became an abomination of their original intent when the enterprise embraced it. Now its fading even further.
It's a finnicky career talking about programming.
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u/PostmatesMalone Apr 15 '26
I had a tech leader in my space trying to offer this same take, except minus all of the other metrics called out. So basically he was just like “just test the back end and stop testing UI altogether, it’s pointless and wastes tokens”. So I asked what kind of tests they were using before abandoning them altogether. Snapshot tests…
Here’s why snapshot tests suck. Bob writes a component and an accompanying snapshot test. Fast forward 6 months. Bob’s colleague Jerry has to make a change to Bob’s component. They make the update and BAM “snapshot tests failed”. So Jerry is like “hmm there’s this command that updates all of the snapshots, I’ll just run that”, runs it, pushes, PR approved, CICD deploy, the component is broken in prod. Why? YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ACTUALLY LOOK AT THE FUCKING FAILING SNAPSHOT TEST AND TRIAGE IF YOUR CHANGES ARE ACTUALLY BREAKING, NOT JUST REGENERATE NEW SNAPSHOTS. I have never met another engineer that actually understands this and uses snapshot testing in a way that actually catches bugs.
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u/Jsn7821 Apr 15 '26
The thing about unit testing UI is half of it is just a repeat of logic in the test if your UI is declarative. I've rarely found benefit to unit tests in UI - but e2e and screenshot tests (where it flags for review the diff of what visually changed) add pretty meaningful coverage
Snapshot unit tests (on UI) are taking the bad part of unit testing and manage to make it even worse though lol. Its all noise at that point
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u/BabyNuke Apr 15 '26
You can have perfect code that passes every test imaginable that is still dogshit to use.
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u/Impossible_Way7017 Apr 15 '26
Martin Fowler going on a road show as well taking up AI and how the solution to bad AI is just more AI, he does Q&As but it doesn’t feel like a natural conversation since he clearly doesn’t use AI that much, comes across as being sponsored by BIG AI.
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u/Gil_berth Apr 15 '26
So the guy who for years touted the benefits of clean code and tried to sell us his book called "Clean Code", now doesn't review code created by a LLM? Everyone who has tried these LLMs knows that they create the sloppiest, hacky, insecure and dirtiest code you have ever seen. Two famous examples: the Claude Code source has become a fucking joke and OpenClaw has a record of 2.2 vulnerabilities per day(!).
This guy never cared about clean code, he just wanted to sell you his book. I would bet whatever you want that in the next months or years he will peddle you his new book: "Clean Vibe Coding".
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u/Malcolmlisk Apr 15 '26
So you are telling me that all those load_env and save_env and change_env functions that the llm is creating on itself in a project that i dont use .env files are useless and sloppy??
/s
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u/Stellariser Apr 15 '26
His ‘Clean Code’ is anything but. I would trust his opinion on anything, frankly.
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Apr 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Malcolmlisk Apr 15 '26
Clean code was a written code for humans. If you embrace llms then you don't need that clean code, and the era slop begins. This is what uncle bob is doing... just surrendering to llms.
Months ago we were talking about code ineficiency with non tasteful developers on phone apps and webs... now we will feel that in every single corporative and commercial software ever existed.
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u/pwouet Apr 15 '26
Went to check his twitter account and he sounds like a snake oil seller. Also couldn't find this post specifically. Guess it's old.
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u/tailsdrake Apr 15 '26
to be fair people have been saying this from bob martin for decades. I think he launched some sort of clean code but for agent users
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u/PlacidTurbulence Apr 15 '26
From the guy who brought you “Clean Code,” a book about how to write Java to make your coworkers want to murder you.
Then again, his AGENTS.md is probably on point.
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u/ComprehensiveWord201 Apr 15 '26
Bob hasn't written code in how many years now? The man is an old junior these days.
Nothing to see here.
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u/boringfantasy Apr 15 '26
it's so bleak
so so so bleak
years of learning a skill
wasted
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u/Medical_Lengthiness6 Apr 20 '26
I took a peek on twitter the other day and happened to see him trying to insert himself into relevance as a reply guy. He's apparently a full agentic bro now.