Hey agent, make it look like its human written with speling erors And shit

TODO: write TODO comments

# [project name]

TODO: write readme

Remmber when Most Google products were marked Beta? those were the days when Google software was still great.

GOTO TODO

Google software was never great. It always was buggy, laggy and with horrendous UI.

Also doesn't have those damn emojis 🎯️ ✅️

GMail and GReader were great and way ahead of the other players.

Closing GReader was what radicalized me against Google.

If there's a readme, there's documentation. It might not be enough, it might be out of date,, it might be wrong, but it's still documentation.

The hate you had for them was made recent. I, I was full of the hatred from the early times. I have carried the hate for an age now, and it has crystallised into a rage that will never be sated.

Inbox my beloved

Google Music was great. Stream my collection without any legwork other than uploading? Thank you! But fuck off for killing it.

Even if the readme has nothing but the repository name?

RIP Inbox, we'll never forget you 😭

// I don't know how this works, but it works, please don't touch it

the most incoherent piece of code you have seen in your life, taken directly from the Book of the Death

The OG blackbox

Also spelling mistakes, cant forget those

As an open source project maintainer I can always tell whenever a pull request is AI assisted because no human would ever write full tests for all their pull requests.

Then you know where to find it!

Humans understand that their work is unfinished.

Uh oh, I pretty much always do this. Especially for new-to-me projects. The less confident I am about how the whole thing works, the more I write tests for my change. Should I stop pushing them so people don't think I'm Claude?

Yep, it was Inbox for me. Fuckers.

Libtcod? Cool project. Btw do those generated tests tend to be helpful or confusing?

I’m starting to see posts on social media that are clearly an AI bot based on the wording (e.g. shuffling a few key pieces of info around and slightly rephrasing the post they’re replying to), but written in all lowercase. They’re trying to make it seem like a lazy/sloppy human wrote it when it’s really just a sloppy bot.

Nice try bot. The Terminators are already trying to blend in.

Best not to even perceive it.

Who needs TODOs when you can just forget about the things and have less to do?

recently i've come across posts that sound like ai. they only repeat infoemation from the previous conversation in a different order. but they are all lowercase and misspelled, trying to make it seem like the work of stinky humans when it is actually the work of esteemed high quality superior ai.

Too true...

Yep, and that's where I wonder if AI written code might, eventually, be more maintainable... at least by AI.

If you've got 100% coverage for every feature, yeah, people are going to think you're a bot.

The important part is that the tests track regressions and they're helpful for that. After that, it's okay if tests are mostly write-only.

I've noticed that AI commentary tends to describe what the code is doing verbatim which is better for naming tests and functions rather than writing code comments, docstrings, or change notes. I usually have to fix this public-facing documentation to not talk about library internals which no user of the library would ever care about.

So far I feel that AI assists are good when you have the time and effort to push back on them, but that isn't an option for all projects, it works well for my own projects which have very few contributors in the first place. For the most part I can treat them with the same scrutiny as human written code. When the person submitting the code is obviously not checking their own code then that's a problem.

You laugh, but in 5 years, a metric butt ton of vibe coded projects will look exactly like this.

Those are right in with the em-dash, real people just don't take the time...

I had a PhD write that on an algorithm we refined after an all-team (6 member) code review. He quit shortly thereafter. (It wasn't that hard, just a loop unroll on the inner loop.)

From what I've seen and heard, AI seems to do well for test-driven development. That doesn't necessarily translate into good code, but it does translate into tested code.

At the very least it can translate the documentation of an API into the appropriate tests to verify the documentation is correct, and I'm being quite humbled by that.

Just create a Jira ticket in the backlog and forget about it. That way it becomes a team/company process failing, not a personal one.

Nice try hoo-man

I do like what Ctrl-Semicolon does in a text input

I'm still a fan of emoticons personally, can't beat >:( to express irritation for example.

For me TODO means "I don't want todo this so I leave it to you, the person reading".

GOAT TODO IS BEAUTIFUL ❤️

One problem I could see with the aggressive testing (which also happens in human-written codebases) is that it becomes hard to tell essential behaviour apart from details. If you nail everything down with a unit/integration test, nothing can be changed anymore.

I could imagine that this is part of the reason why LLMs love to duplicate code rather than adjusting existing code.

I mean, the thing with LLMs is that they tend to overdo it. They test completely unnecessary details. Your idea of having tests for all features is probably still way less tests than the typical LLM-generated commit...

Implementation is left as an exercise for the user

As a corollary, AI takes those out of date TODOs and READMEs as gospel truth and doesn't look any further. I kept a "janitor list" in main() but maybe wasn't too great at scrubbing it on the regular. AI took a long detour to work around problems that didn't exist anymore.

I do use it and find it useful but it's like your kids helping you cook dinner. You can not take your eyes off it. Otherwise you get to flip a coin between firetrucks or emergency room.

They don't do nuance very well. A minor problem is a thing to solve NOW whatever the cost.

I use the compose key on Linux and free software called wincompose on Windows — this allows me easy access to real characters easily, so I can say 25¢ instead of $0.25, or talk about how it's only getting up to around 65°F today, or since I'm in the US and have the dollar sign easily but I have a couple of online services in the EU, I can easily say I pay €10,95/mo for one of them.

I prefer using the actual characters - so when I say ¿Por qué no los dos? it's correct.

One of the things that has absolutely pissed me off is em dashes becoming more common and attributed to AI. I use the fucking things because they are useful and I've used them for 15+ years. It used to be a Good Thing™, but now occasionally gets me accused of being AI. Especially since, as you can see by this very reply, I afraid neither of writing nor reading, and because of my ADHD, I tend to run a bit on the verbose side of things.

I guess, thinking about it, I'm in the same boat as artists who now face similar accusations. I suppose I'm lucky, though, as the accusations against me are rare, comparitively.

Real people absolutely do use em dashes and always have. Certainly it's less common, but absolutely a thing.

The README can only be out of date if the project is maintained without too much AI.

Because AI could fix a typo and then waste your tokens regenerating the entire README to tell new users that there was a typo that was removed.

The damn apps that auto change emoticons to emoji I'm expressing :/ not :corpoface: ...