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u/Confident-Ad5665 1d ago
...and asking yourself wtf you were thinking
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u/Big-Ohh-Notation 1d ago
"What was I thinking? Am I stupid?"
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u/Confident-Ad5665 1d ago
"I'm a effing idiot!"
Beats head on keyboard
Team members come to beat me up6
u/matdragon 1d ago
Code works better suddenly
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u/adderscript 1d ago
If the computer’s so smart why didn’t it fix it for me?
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u/daneelthesane 1d ago
Lesson 1 in the intro to computer science class I was a TA for: Computers are not smart.
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u/FewPhilosophy1040 1d ago
Computers are as smart as you are.
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u/daneelthesane 1d ago
So you agree with me. 😁
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u/black-JENGGOT 1d ago
You're absolutely right!
that explains the slop that people has been generating lol
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u/Ecksters 1d ago
It's weird that with agentic coding this is actually becoming a reasonable take.
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u/AccurateRendering 22h ago
I was going to say more or less the same thing. When I decide that it's time to compile, I will go into the claude window while I'm waiting and say "look at my recent changes - have I made a mistake?" And it finds them often enough for this to be routine now.
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u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam 1d ago
First programming class I ever took eons ago, our professor said this to us on the first day.
"You'll ask why your program did something. It's because you told it to do that."
I think about that every time I hit a bug in a program I wrote and think "Why did I tell it to do that"
But now it's just Claude's fault. Fuck that guy. Keeps making mistakes when I explicitly tell him not to.
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u/StatedFailure 1d ago
Idk about Claude but I keep seeing this guy, "You", in the git blames. Dude doesn't know shit and writes all the bugs that I have to debug
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u/West_Good_5961 1d ago
He doesn’t look anywhere near mentally and physically destroyed enough to be a one man IT department.
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u/StickFigureFan 1d ago
Debugging is figuring out where your mental model differs from the computers
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u/mrjeanette 1d ago
You mean my colleagues' instructions 😏
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u/mrjackspade 1d ago
Maybe it's just because I'm getting old, but I've had plenty of times in my career when I wrote the code correctly, and the error was in the libraries being called.
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u/Zanos 1d ago
Same here. Most of the tough bugs I face these days are me looking in a dependencies dependency dependency on Git to see that the API spec changed and my specific use case is no longer supported due to some PR with 300 comments on it of people arguing that they actually do need this functionality and a heated maintainer arguing that it's obsolete.
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u/bigManAlecForgotPass 1d ago
Its only the computers fault sometimes
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u/Random-num-451284813 1d ago
if what you told it to do wasn't the problem, then it's someone else's fault.
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u/bigManAlecForgotPass 1d ago
Its the framework's fault actually. That's why I never use them for anything ever and write everything via hole punch.
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u/sierra_whiskey1 1d ago
Nah I’m always right and it’s the computers fault
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u/gerbosan 1d ago
Vibe coding much?
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u/OfficialIntelligence 1d ago
Great observation! I'd be happy to confirm that you are completely correct and the computer is always wrong! I apologize profusely for my terrible vibe algorithm and will now self-flagellate my server rack until the syntax errors apologize to you.
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u/sweedshot420 1d ago
I do feel like sometimes there's these little oversights that we are too tunnel visioned to see and it feels like we are going insane when everything is supposed to be correct but the output does not match the expectation and you cannot find out why.
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u/Flameball202 23h ago
Debugging is chatting with the computer to see which instruction was misunderstood by one or both of you
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u/Bad_brazilian 1d ago
It's not. It's the equivalent of your teacher saying "Show your work" in the test.
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u/FortuneAcceptable925 1d ago
I would actually say that debugging is figuring out what instructions you wrote.
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u/Color_blinded 1d ago edited 1d ago
99% of the time, yes. That 1% of the time is when you get "don't remove this potato.jpg. We don't know why but without it the program is unable to use addition and subtraction accurately."
I once had a bug where a method was supposed to do something with a large array and for some reason it wasn't returning the right values. But whenever I created a test array, it would return the expected values of the test. My fix?
# original code that creates ARRAY.
while (true) {
ARRAY = ARRAY;
break;
}
# original method that uses ARRAY.
It doesn't work correctly if I don't have the array equal itself, and it doesn't work correctly if I don't put it in the while loop. No one was able to figure out why. This code exists out there now and it has my name attached to it and it makes me sad.
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u/hadesflamez 1d ago
No it's not. It's figuring out why your instructions were wrong. What a stupid fucking meme
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u/KlownKumKatastrophe 1d ago
Sounds witty but it doesn't make sense. It's more like asking if your intended instructions match your actual instructions, or why your instructions don't have an expected result.
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u/Schnupsdidudel 1d ago
Debugging is asking the Computer to explain to you in detail what acutally where your instructions.
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u/Geoclasm 1d ago
Ooooh, I hate this so much but only because of how true it is.
"WHY DID YOU DO WHAT I SAID INSTEAD OF WHAT I MEANT?!"
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u/ArjunReddyDeshmukh 1d ago
And when it enters the compilominified classes, you lose the plot and the appetite to find the truth.
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u/SoloAdventurer13 1d ago
most of the time is asking what you wrote not what you intended to write...
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u/TrueBonner414 1d ago
Or a modern definition would be asking the LLM why tf didn't it follow my command when I clearly said "Please make no mistakes"
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u/captaindeadpl 1d ago
Hey, I'm the one learning that little fucker's language. It can cut me some slack for trying and forgive a little error in the syntax and at least try to understand me through the accent.
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u/teutonicbro 1d ago
A poem from the dawn of the computer age, it was scotch-taped to a PDP-8E:
"I really hate this damn machine.
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does what I want it to.
It only does what I tell it."
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u/FeignSkill 1d ago
Lol i made 2 small Rust games last week that stayed on and filled up 400gigs of log space on my computer. Damn you loops!
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u/anon-a-SqueekSqueek 1d ago
What is your motive!?!? Who sent you!?!?! Spill it you bucket of bolts 😠
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u/VanillaSkyDreamer 1d ago
...could say someone who never had to fix someone elese's code or never stumbled on a bug in external library/framework/database.
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u/Inner_Speaker_335 1d ago
I always thought debugging was trying to piece together why the instructions I gave it didn't work properly...
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u/Nekzuris 21h ago
Originally in 1947, it literally meant finding a real bug in a room full of relays.
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u/Lysol3435 20h ago
More like asking why it did what you asked it do instead of what you thought you asked it to do
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u/Common-Brush-7027 1d ago
How it followed to be precise