The proper solution

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.
  
  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
  
  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://xkcd.com/979/
  https://m.xkcd.com/979/ <- Mobile version with alt text
- 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

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?
- 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
- 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.

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.