My #1 pet peeve is when someone comes to me with a problem, and the solution is in the fucking console output or error message.
On a bad day, if I had unilateral power, I would fire those people on the spot.
At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It'd stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.
Developers were constantly pinging slack about "why is this test broken??". Most of the time, the error message would be like "Never found an element matching css selector #whatever" or "Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away". There'd be screenshots and logs, and usually when you'd look you'd see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.
We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there's a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.
I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, "why is this test broken?". I'd say "What did the cat say?" They'd say "What cat?" And I'd know they hadn't even looked at the error message.
There's a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It's weird.
There's a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It's weird.
I got handed the keys to the network monitoring suite many moons ago. I immediately started editing the default alert actions to display relevant information, and in some outlier cases escalation procedures.
Most times, it was ignored. Other times, it was skimmed and half-followed. A few people outright refused to do anything differently than they had before (kick it up the ladder).
Glad to be rid of that place.
i think that guy works for us now :D
the best bit is he pings multiple senior devs in slack separately.
so we are all wasting our time doing the same shit in parallel for the same muppet.
Big brain move from the Muppet
Another reason why I don't want more copilot and chatgpt to beginners
Same here. For some fucking reason reading is so damn difficult
Error: pull your head out of your ass
Hey I got this error what do
Inc write-up for telling them to follow the instructions in the error message.
to be fair you couldnt read the error in that situation
Minecraft mod users are the worst. They'll post a screenshot of a version mismatch or dependency error that literally tells them how to resolve it and ask "hey, this mod isn't working, how do I fix it?"
Yes but they are 12
I figured that shit out when I was 12 and there were way less learning resources about it on the internet then. Fuck 'em. Someone who never has to solve their own problems without handholding is someone who will never learn to solve problems, period. IPad kids are scared of error messages and that's their problem. They've never had to troubleshoot anything before.
Though I can't blame the kids entirely. Most error messages in the modern era absolutely suck nuts. Half of them nowadays (at least on the client side) are just
"oopsie, there's been a widdle fucky wucky, sooorrrrryyyyy 💖"
With zero actionable info in it. Not even a distinction of You/We/Your ISP Has Fucked Something Up. I guess they figured (correctly) that the end user wasn't going to read it anyway so why bother, but this drives me nuts when I see it.
To be more fair to Minecraft mod users most of them are middle schoolers
The selective illiteracy gets me: clearly, they can read each other's messages. The text in an error message? Brain shuts off.
tbf the text in error messages very often leads down a rabbit hole of barely relevant context, rather than to the shortest path to getting things to work as you expect them to. Or maybe they just don't understand what the word "deprecated" means or implies.
Error message: "you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to fix this"
Junior dev: 😵
Sometimes I'll copy paste the error message back to them. Apparently it works better when it's in a text message.
On the context of a node package, I'm pretty sure that "solution" is utterly worthless and doesn't come even close to targeting the same functionality the old code had.
But odds are the one place the library author used that function can be replaced by a completely different functionality that happens to use the suggestion.
On the context of a node package,
It's probably a package with one five line function, and a poor implementation at that.
Well, atleast they explained how they "fixed" the problem.
Got to love those "all good, problem solved/went away" - posted 5 years ago
Who were you DenverCoder9? What did you see?
https://m.xkcd.com/979/ <- Mobile version with alt text
Long pressing on the image also shows the alt text btw
Unfortunately not all mobile browsers will show the entirety of the alt text if it's too long, Firefox Focus on Android 15 and this exact comic is a perfect example, for my screen it cuts off about 3/4 through the alt text. The mobile version ensures it's all readable
idk if Firefox focus does this, but on vanilla Firefox mobile, you can tap the text to expand it :3
Well I'll be damned. Thanks for the tip can confirm Firefox Focus expands alt text when you tap it in the context menu!
Does tapping on the shown part of the text expand it? I only discovered this recently but it works on both firefox and chrome for me
Yep! Learned me a thing today!
yeah, even if you have no idea why something started working again, at least write that
People like this are the reason AI is so unreliable at exploring code issues.
Like, I just want Copilot to look at my dependencies to explain a vague error I’m seeing and it’s telling me to downgrade Ruby, upgrade Rails, and install Python. Bro, it’s a node package.
Maybe the onus should be on LLM developers to filter out trash like this from their training datasets
At any rate, it's extremely unhelpful to not include a version number at the very very least
Damn, if only you could learn to understand the errors. Then you woudln't have to depend on an llm with hundreds of underpaid workers behind it.
git gud
Me? Reading that there's a drop-in replacement function for the one that was deprecated, in the error message? Why I'd never!
Hold up, hold up... We've got an ai to do the reading for us. I've asked it to summarise what you said. That should give me a bit less reading to do...
The statement appears to be a sarcastic or humorous remark expressing frustration or disbelief regarding an error message that includes a "drop-in replacement function" for a deprecated function. The speaker seems to imply that it is frustrating or almost unbelievable to encounter a message that offers a solution, particularly one suggesting that the replacement can seamlessly take the place of the deprecated function.
By saying, "Why I'd never!", the speaker is likely exaggerating their frustration or mock surprise, indicating that they might have encountered this situation often or that such suggestions are generally not taken seriously.
This type of comment suggests that the speaker might be somewhat jaded or irritated by encountering such "helpful" messages, perhaps due to previous experiences where the suggested solutions were inadequate, difficult to implement, or not as straightforward as they seem.
"Right? It's almost like they think a one-line replacement function is going to fix all the issues. It's never as simple as the message makes it sound, is it? I’ve definitely been burned by those before."
This response acknowledges the speaker's frustration and shares a similar sentiment, while also reinforcing the idea that these "helpful" messages don’t always live up to expectations.
How do such people program? Does anything they do even have any meaning to them?
OG vibe coders
How do such people program?
They don't. They used to copy and paste stuff they found on the internet, then when it doesn't work they made a barely coherent post on Stack Exchange, or maybe the issue tracker of one of the packages they think they're using. I suppose that nowadays they copy and paste whatever they get out of the LLM de jour, then try to tell it that it didn't work, copy and paste the answer and repeat until it either compiles or they finally give up and post to an issue tracker.
Ahh... the ostrich approach
I have a bunch of colleagues like this. If they were left to their ways we'd still be using unpatched frameworks from 20 years ago. I find it pretty frustrating.
Same. "If the warning doesn't break the build, just ignore it," (even if it literally says it's going to break the build in the next major release)
"I fixed the problem by putting /* eslint-disable */ at the top of a file"
I don't understand these kinds of people. Do the text recognition part of their brain completely shuts down when their eyes look at a warning/error message? Like do they only see amorphous blobs in place of the warning/error message?
Sometimes (not in this instance) the error message is completely worthless. I remember one time trying to configure automatic backups in Cloud Native Postgres and it just wasn't working, the errors were opaque. So I asked on the project's github what the problem was and the devs were quite unhelpful. Some random user came along and said "Oh you need to set the S3 region like this..." and backups started working.
I've worked with developers like this in the past. They'll see an error come up, read it, and then sort of just start clicking on random stuff and refreshing the page. Eventually, you roll over and say "Hey man, how's dev going?" And they may or may not say "hmm, got this error...", at which point you enter into the most frustrating partner programming session of your life, because they won't stop scrolling and clicking when you're trying to read the god damn error message on their screen
That's not an error, it's a warning. It shouldn't break anything...
Exactly
Wait I thought the deprecation of the deprecation warning was deprecated.
This is only gonna get worse thanks to vibe coding
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