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Russell F (previously) sends us a small one today. It's not just a representative line, it's a representative comment. More than that, it's a true confession. Russell wrote some code, you see, and the logic was confusing. So, a co-worker added a comment to explain what the code was doing:
Apr 26'This is *supposed* to fail. If it fails to fail, it throws a failure message
As previously discussed, C++ took a surprisingly long time to get a "starts with" function for strings. It took even longer to get a function called "contains". In part, that's simply because string::find solves that problem.
Nancy sends us a… different approach to solving this problem.
Today's anonymous submitter sends us some code that just makes your mind go… blank when you look at it.
public static boolean isNull(String value) {
return StringUtils.isBlank(value);
}
If you've seen one developer recounting how their AI agent deleted production, you've seen them all. They're mostly not interesting stories. It's like watching someone speeding through traffic on a motorcycle without a helmet: the eventual tragedy is sad, but it's unsurprising and not an interesting story to tell. It's not even interesting as a warning: the kind of person who speeds on a motorcycle without a helmet isn't doing so because they don't understand the danger. They've just decided it doesn't apply to them.
But the founder of PocketOS, Jer, recently shared how- whoopsie!- their AI agent deleted production. There's a lot of ingredients that go into this particular disaster, which I think makes it interesting, because the use of a poorly supervised AI agent is only one ingredient in this absolute trainwreck of a story.
