Uncle Bob: It's Over

monkpit

It’s hard to give up, but likely necessary. That doesn’t mean quality has to suffer, we can still gate with deterministic quality tooling where it matters. But yeah, at some scale it stops mattering how human readable the code is, as long as AI can effectively and efficiently (token-wise) make edits or add features.

duped

I fully believe AI can write better code faster than Robert C. Martin.

GiorgioG

Clean Architecture and Uncle Bob can take a hike.

abbadadda

I thought this was about Uncle Bob being “canceled.”

RobRivera

That's just, like, his opinion man

adriand

Kind of a great video! I enjoyed it. His point about testing coverage and generating mutations to ensure the tests fail resonated. I get concerned sometimes that the AI is writing tests not to ensure the logic is correct, but to ensure the tests pass against the code it already wrote. Any other ideas on this? Is there a code review step or CI checkpoint that would decrease the likelihood of that?

relativeadv

"Forty years later, in September of 2018, I started working on this version of Space War. It's an animated GUI driven system with a frame rate of 30fps. It is written entirely in Clojure and uses the Quil shim for the Processing GUI framework." - Robert Martin https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2021/11/28/Spacewar.ht...

tgma

For all LLM flaws, if it kills the whole Agile/SCRUM/whatever grift, it will have been worth it. The damage these guys have done to software industry at large is unfathomable.

MeetingsBrowser

The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be the first to know. Just try it and see!

doginasuit

There are probably some respectable workflows that involve an LLM writing most of the code, but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem. You still have to tell it what to write and how it should work or there are high odds that you'll get a hot mess. And there still needs to be a human that understands everything there and how to debug it. For me, the most enjoyable path there is to write it myself, because I would rather be involved in writing the code than only involved in reading it. It might not be the fastest path there, but it gets the job done for the foreseeable future. I could end up like the Amish who choose not to use technology that was developed after a certain point, from what I can tell they do alright.

daviding

English is the new programming language.

LaGrange

I'm an AI skeptic, but I do think that _he_ will be out-coded by AI, no problem.

perrygeo

I tend to agree with his point. But I found myself laughing at the style; just ranting about software like a cartoon villain in his bathrobe. No fucks given.

mrcartmeneses

Uncle Bob full of shit? Colour me purple!

julionc

"It is unavoidable. It is your destiny. You, like your father, are now mine."

HumblyTossed

He helped enshitify the industry - empowering midlings to cry about "clean code" instead of actually learning to produce a great product. No thanks, Bob.

OldSchool

More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned. As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly on a plane controlled by AI-designed and AI-tested code, but much of development is busy work, not problem solving or design. AI excels at turning a protocol spec into a parser for example. I'll take that any day. AI excels at finding stuff, particularly non-code, thesis-level ideas for algorithms and also at about the same level, what's been shown not to work when solving a non-deterministic problem. If we're lucky, AI will fill in after exposing who is only doing busy work and who is creating.

oytis

That gotta be a joke right? It's like running agents to write agent ochestrators to write orchestrators for orchestrators just for clean code

cmiles74

I don't have a lot of patience for Bob. That being said I have to agree with him on test coverage (that's as far as I made it through his monologue). IMHO, that is something that I 100% am okay letting the LLM tooling write and manage. I used to argue about whether or not we needed a test that verified that the value of a constant didn't change, and if 100% coverage was really that important. Now I don't care, I just let Claude write the test and keep it up-to-date.

andrewl

That was a bizarre performance.