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.

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

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?"

The selective illiteracy gets me: clearly, they can read each other's messages. The text in an error message? Brain shuts off.

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.

Who were you DenverCoder9? What did you see?

yeah, even if you have no idea why something started working again, at least write that

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

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.

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.

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

Exactly