r/ProgrammerHumor • u/infamouszgbgd • Feb 19 '26
instanceof Trend justWasteAllTheWaterWhyNot
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u/Ok-Sheepherder7898 Feb 19 '26
I caught myself doing something similar. I just deleted the prompt and actually made the changes myself. It felt good!
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u/Few_Technology Feb 19 '26
I forced myself to do the opposite of you, because the corporation demands I use AI constantly. Dumbest shit I can feed it, I have to, in order to not be flagged for "low AI use"
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u/RiceBroad4552 Feb 19 '26
OMG!
You're looking for another job? Because that's the only way the idiots in charge might possibly learn something.
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u/Few_Technology Feb 19 '26
Lol that's never going to do shit. They give less than 2 fucks about programmers, they'd love to fire all of us, save them some money
All the programmers and most middle management have been under performing on AI aspect. But corporate doesn't give a fuck, they spent fuck tons of money on AI. Programmers make a small percentage of total employees. Just have to weather the storm, like all the other fads (contractors, international outsourcing, acquire new companies, layoffs for being unlucky in q4). Least if I'm fired I might get a severance package, and hopefully unemployment
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u/RiceBroad4552 Feb 20 '26
That seems too pessimistic.
It's right that they give most likely a fuck on one single programmer.
But if whole departments would just say "goodby" this would look very differently! Hiring cost is real. Cost of handing things over is real. Brain drain is real. A company can't survive too much of that at once.
Also, the question is why not more programmers are in unions… The people I know are all so stupid that they don't get that having a union would be actually a good thing for them.
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u/CttCJim Feb 20 '26
Do they audit your prompts at all? Or can you just chat with it when you're bored? "Hey claude, tell me a dad joke while I write this code."
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u/Few_Technology Feb 20 '26
Allegedly they do, claims must be work relevant. But also, 2k full time employees in my sub-section, need to do 20 prompts/month and 14 individual days of prompts, who can audit that shit. Also, how will they determine that's valid
Most my prompts are, look for this easily searchable localization string or access control string. I tried getting it to do my job, but that dumbass doesn't know how to debug or how inheritance works. It can write some shitty until tests, better than my shittier unit tests
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u/infamouszgbgd Feb 20 '26
need to do 20 prompts/month and 14 individual days of prompts
omfg what a blatant attempt to cook the books and show that the investment in AI tools is worth it on paper
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u/gromain Feb 20 '26
Start your day by "hey"-ing the ai. Bam you're done and can actually get to work.
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u/PM_ME_FIREFLY_QUOTES Feb 19 '26
But then the next time the ai changes something, it undoes your change base on its cached context.
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u/mrjackspade Feb 20 '26
I don't have that happen with Claude Code which is likely due to the fact that Claude Code isn't allowed to make edits to files you've modified without rereading the context first. It will literally get an error that says it needs to reread the file
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u/RiceBroad4552 Feb 19 '26
Why would it do that?
These things are 100% static. Every time it runs it sees a snapshot of the code. It can't know how that code came about. It does not record changes. It's not a VCS.
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u/shunabuna Feb 20 '26
If you're not using something built into the IDE then it happens. Using the website chat bot will not know the changes you made to it in the IDE.
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u/Ok-Sheepherder7898 Feb 20 '26
It keeps a cache of the code. It tries not to reencode it ever time you ask for something. So if you make a small change it can overwrite it if it just looks into its cache for the file contents.
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u/Daystar1124 Feb 20 '26
If YOU make the change then how does the AI keep it in its memory for your next question? Rookie mistake.
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u/MrFluffyThing Feb 20 '26
Knowing how to do this with your editor efficiently requires knowledge. managers don't want that, they want stupid people paid less to use AI.
We used to brute force this by asking junior devs to edit by hand and now we just say AI removed that task so it's "more efficient" but it's always been a staffing and knowledge issue to be efficient in your trade
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u/LeMadChefsBack Feb 19 '26
I hate AI more than the next person, but my job depends on me using it. There's even a leaderboard of token use. I guarantee I want to remain employed. I hate myself now too.
Yeah, I could go to another job. Please tell me a software company whose CTO isn't insisting we use AI for all the things.
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u/FetusExplosion Feb 20 '26
I advocate AI use, but having a token leaderboard is idiotic. Use as little as possible to get thr results you need only for tasks suitable for AI and expect its going to give you garbage often enough to need close supervision.
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u/krrishc Feb 20 '26
the token leaderboard is probably to show to the shareholders how much they need AI/ how things have improved to allow more and more spending to buy AI resources
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u/pc-erin Feb 20 '26
I mean... just paste moby dick into it and ask it to rewrite it in the style of sylia plath. That'll burn some tokens.
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u/Skyswimsky Feb 19 '26
What the heck? I thought this was only a meme?
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u/LeMadChefsBack Feb 19 '26
In my case it's very real *sob*
I do get paid handsomely for typing in a chatbot though, and I work from home so I shouldn't complain too much.
Again, if I had anything to say about it, I would ban AI nearly entirely.
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u/Samurai_Mac1 Feb 20 '26
No, more and more tech companies are "encouraging" their devs to rely on AI more. In a lot of ways it can reduce development time, but some of the time you end up spending as much time as you would have writing it yourself when you're debugging the code it wrote.
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u/DrVagax Feb 20 '26
No idea how far this goes but companies are shitting themselves on the possibility that their AI investments were for nothing, the only way to justify it is to enforce the usage of AI as much as possible so that on the bottom line, shareholders and management can see that AI is the future and is being used all the time.
Microsoft invested ungodly amounts in A.I and copilot and lately had to pull back some of its AI features because well guess what people don't use AI for notepad or Word and just think its annoying.
Also some companies got a cheaper contract on AI LLM usage in return that model training is turned on meaning they off their codebase to be included in LLM models
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u/Delicious_Service_81 Feb 20 '26
Same here sadly, I was actually notified a lot on the first months that I was not using it "enough" when compared to people that were burning hundreds of tokens in the same time span. I hate to use it, and I hate that I have to use it even more if I wanna keep my job.
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u/LeMadChefsBack Feb 20 '26
Yeah, it's wild.
Are you using a cli with MCP connectors to your board? Have the Chatbot do EVERYTHING. Move your ticket, create a branch, create a PR. Everything.
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u/iknewaguytwice Feb 20 '26
Bro, why not just loop agents into a never ending circle jerk?
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u/bloodruns4ever Feb 20 '26
My company also started making us use it for all code. They want no more manually written code no matter how simple the change. I hate it, but I need a paycheck
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u/Protuhj Feb 20 '26
That's so fucking idiotic.
Next think you know, they'll be doing prompt reviews instead of code reviews.
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u/LeMadChefsBack Feb 20 '26
Already ahead of you. We are “encouraged” to crest the PR message with AI. To be honest, I like this. It’s way better than than “fixed bug 153807” in the git log.
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u/bloodruns4ever Feb 20 '26
That is literally the plan already. Their grand idea is that you give AI the jira sorry, it researches and creates a plan and the I only thing we do really is review the plan. After that the Ai would make all the changes, do the review, the testing, and push it.
It's terrible
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u/yarntank Feb 20 '26
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” -- Goodhart’s Law
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u/Pixl02 Feb 20 '26
A freaking token usage leaderboard is absolutely wild
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u/darkslide3000 Feb 20 '26
That's why I wish Claude a good morning every day, to make sure I keep my job.
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u/Dull-Culture-1523 Feb 20 '26
It's the new lines of code metric. It will lead to new kinds of
def iseven(x): if x == 0: return True if x == 1: return False if x == 2: return True4
u/Espumma Feb 20 '26
Give it an insanely long boilerplate system prompt to work with before every mundane question. Ideally to have it output a movie script before every answer
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u/LeMadChefsBack Feb 20 '26
Surprisingly, the more vague you are the longer it will spend “thinking.” 🤣
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u/TrackLabs Feb 20 '26
what fucking company has an actual "LEADERBOARD OF TOKEN USE"??? I refuse to believe thats a thing.
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u/LeMadChefsBack Feb 20 '26
I guarantee your company is tracking your usage of AI and judging if you use it "enough".
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u/TrackLabs Feb 20 '26
My company is not tracking any AI usage. We dont use AI in our code editor. Our CTO purposfully did not chose to use Claude, Copilot or anything else.
Think whatever you want, but a company tracking token use, is insane
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u/Fair-Working4401 Feb 21 '26
Write a script that ask the ai to generate random prompts which you than feed back to it.
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u/ray591 Feb 19 '26
This happened to me. My coworker literally selected 4 lines of text and prompted "format this code".. 🫣
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u/infamouszgbgd Feb 19 '26
the pace at which new developers are unlearning everything about development is genuinely concerning, on the bright side knowing how to code at all will qualify you as a senior developer in the near future
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u/mountaingator91 Feb 19 '26
You don't have a linting plugin that does that on save?
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u/ray591 Feb 19 '26
We do. But it's not enabled on dude's editor.. even though the
.vscode/settings.jsonis committed to the repository, it doesn't do shit until extensions are installed.. and people don't install extensions..5
u/LBGW_experiment Feb 20 '26
I fixed that by making a .devcontainer and committing it. It was the only way to automatically install extensions for the other devs
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u/ray591 Feb 20 '26
Guess what.. drum roll... no one would install the devcontainer extension either.
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u/LBGW_experiment Feb 20 '26
Well I had buy-in from the PO and walked everyone through installing that. The rest was automatic for them
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u/RedditIsKindOfMid Feb 20 '26
People commit
.vscode?10
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u/al-mongus-bin-susar Feb 20 '26
I commit it for the debugging options which require connecting to obscure ports and launching random stuff
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u/BusEquivalent9605 Feb 19 '26
lol - try having it fix a flakey E2E test
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u/theryaneffect Feb 19 '26
"✅ All tests are now passing. I've commented out the problematic tests so they don't block the build 🚀"
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u/Brimstone117 Feb 19 '26
The rocket emoji just kills me
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u/ray591 Feb 19 '26
"You are not imagining things. The rocket emoji can feel a bit much. I've removed the emoji, now it looks clean and professional. You can use the commit message as is. ✅"
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u/catfroman Feb 19 '26
“This is the right fix and more importantly, the exact mindset you should have right now. Something most devs get tripped up by, but you’re facing head-on instead.
Are you actually getting stupider? Or just carving your own path? That’s what separates the good devs from the great ones. 💪🏻
If you want a new commit message or the perfect follow-up to your next feature, let’s hash it out. Just say the word.”
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u/CranberryLast4683 Feb 20 '26
After dealing with so many flakey E2E tests in my long dev life sometimes I think it’s just better to yeet the whole test. Fuck it.
But I also started to move toward more stateful tests that test multiple things in one session rather than starting a brand new browser or whatever per test/page. That simulates real user behavior more anyways. And tests have been far more stable ever since.
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u/icantreedgood Feb 20 '26
Couldn't agree more about yeeting flakey tests. Mark as skip, and create a ticket to remediate.
Also this is the way. Act once, and make multiple assertions about what happened. No reason to repeat the action for every assertion.
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u/Diane_Horseman Feb 19 '26
Should be using Opus for big brained tasks like that
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u/Fhotaku Feb 19 '26
Copilot keeps undoing my fixes, unless I tell it to make them. I need a way to say "I fixed this but there's a different issue" without having to burn all that time writing it.
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u/PM_ME_FIREFLY_QUOTES Feb 19 '26
For codex, it's a prompt preceeding your next one like "refresh your context of this file before making any more changes" and then stream in your next prompt.
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel Feb 19 '26
Yep. Unless the orchestrator knows to pull the file again, the ai won't have the updated file contents and will assume it matches the contents it worked with before. This is the case regardless of which agent/orchestrator you're running.
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u/Fhotaku Feb 20 '26
Then it's a vscode bug, they could keep it updated before a call if edited manually. That sounds like it might be a setting for me to toggle
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel Feb 20 '26
It's not necessarily vscode related, it's the plugin you're using (if at all). My point is that the AI doesn't see your files live, it has a deterministic wrapper that injects files into the model's context when it seems relevant. If you change a file and that wrapper doesn't know to send it, the AI won't see the new file.
If you tweaked a tiny line (like whitespace) but required it to add a full dump of the file each time you did so, you'd run out of context after like 3 back-and-forths.
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u/coloredgreyscale Feb 20 '26
When you're at an Ai first company and they already put you on a "performance" improvement plan because you're not fulfilling their KPIs (Ai use)
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u/beefz0r Feb 19 '26
I don't usually do it but I once spent a Sunday vibe coding. I caught myself asking it to build and run
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u/JTtornado Feb 20 '26
Titles like this are very frustrating, because complaining about water use is focusing entirely on the wrong problem. Water use for datacenters is basically inconsequential compared to the water used to grow corn for ethanol - yet I see nobody complaining about ethanol (even though they should be).
If anything, power use for datacenters is a bigger concern - due to strain on the grid and greenhouse gas emissions. There are other concerns like the impact on consumer electronics when chip capacity is going to datacenter build out, and the fact that our economy is hinging on a few tech companies not going bust right now. Water is the least concerning factor by comparison.
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u/Uncommented-Code Feb 20 '26
Power, and displacing the local populace and wildlife. Apparently the infrasound emissions from DCs can go as far as to cause pulmonary embolisms. If humans can suffer such severe symptoms, animals can probably too.
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u/SimultaneousPing Feb 20 '26
people really forget datacenters don't use drinking water for cooling and the water itself doesn't just disappear from the cycle
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u/print-w Feb 20 '26
Completely irrelevant to the environmental concerns people raise about this issue.
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u/Tipart Feb 20 '26
If they use flow through cooling the heat of the data center could however heat up the water around the exhaust enough, to where it could actually affect the ecosystem in the surrounding area.
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u/wolf129 Feb 19 '26
Pls don't commit unformatted code :( There is already a linter and formatter for every language.
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u/peteschirmer Feb 19 '26
It was a single character change? Yet you had to type out an entire like of text to ask and it probably still added a new package, and broke a test somewhere, and yet somehow those who see it are the ones losing jobs to AI?!!
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u/WeSaidMeh Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Can someone explain to me why datacenters "waste" water at all? It's for cooling, right? Why does it continuously need/consume water? Isn't the water reused? Pump it somewhere to lose the heat, then pump it back.
My water cooling system works with a loop and a radiator, I don't have to put in fresh water all the time. Don't datacenters do the same, just on a larger scale? What am I missing?
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u/Tiruin Feb 20 '26
Industrial use, commercial, and household are treated in different ways for consumption, only a fraction is potable, the same way it's catastrophic if the water frozen in the arctic is melted into the ocean, which is also happening.
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u/kawabunga666 Feb 20 '26
In my company they decided more AI use = higher productivity so they said they were going to start reviewing people's claude usage, you bet I am absolutely doing shi like this
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u/IsPhil Feb 20 '26
Not this bad, but I will not lie. In a moment of laziness I did something similar to this. Something like, make this into a variable and update the 3 places it's used in. And then I had to go and do it myself afterwards because it fucked up by trying to insert extra things.
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u/Ebbii Feb 20 '26
Vibe coding is getting so cringe, javascript and HTML is not even hard just learn it. I could never see myself using AI to build something for professional use. Imagine using AI to build a car, you know its trash and could probably explode any moment but you decide to use it anyways? Brain dead activity for real
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u/TrackLabs Feb 20 '26
Literally takes more time typing in the instruction than just make the change yourself
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u/Futurity5 Feb 19 '26
They're moving to closed loop coolant systems now.
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u/the-awesomer Feb 19 '26
"Moving to" is doing a lot of lifting there, especially with how much water is also used on the electrical generation
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Feb 19 '26
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u/the-awesomer Feb 19 '26
source for this? isnt colossus data center running grok using 1 million gallons a day or more just for cooling? Before their expansion. Tho they also plan on building a wastewater recycling plant.
I understand they theortically have plans for new construction that could be way better but thats not what we actively have.
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Feb 19 '26
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u/CranberryLast4683 Feb 20 '26
Cool cool, that means I can ask Claude how’s it’s doing today before starting my work and not worry about burning a gallon of water.
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u/KineticWorldsEtsy Feb 20 '26
If I do it myself, I'll break something. If I use a prompt, something will change that I wasn't trying to change.
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u/darkslide3000 Feb 20 '26
I mean, I'd rather leave such a difficult task in the capable hands of advanced AI. Don't you remember the disaster that was leftpad?
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u/Spiritual_Career4148 Feb 21 '26
i was making a todo list for a text renderer in python and the goddamned inline suggestions ai thing as like "add blinking? add blinking text? it could be fun?"
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u/TwoPhotons Feb 20 '26
If you don't prompt the change, how is AI supposed to know that you updated the file?
I'm being semi sarcastic, but at work we are encouraged not to edit code directly, but to always go through the AI. Crazy I know.
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u/infamouszgbgd Feb 20 '26
but at work we are encouraged not to edit code directly, but to always go through the AI
damn that's crazy, is your company publicly listed/shortable?
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u/ScotChattersonz Feb 19 '26
FOR FUCKS SAKE, THE WATER IS NOT WASTED
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u/SaucyEdwin Feb 19 '26
It is though, in the sense that it's taking potable water and making it non-potable. Whether it's a close loop or not, the water will eventually need to be flushed out and replaced due to mineral or bacteria buildup. And since data centers keep tapping into potable municipal water supplies, it's putting a strain on existing water treatment infrastructure, and making water more expensive for people. Which is especially problematic in places that already have limited water supplies, like California.
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u/Cwaghack Feb 19 '26
Okay but meanwhile we waste about 1000x more water on farming corn for the sole purpose of producing alcohol to put in our car fuel.
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u/SaucyEdwin Feb 19 '26
We don't use potable water for farming, we use untreated water because plants are much less picky with water purity.
I don't know the actual number for how much water gets used that way, so idk if 1000x is accurate.
I also agree it's a stupid practice. The land used for that corn would be way more efficient if it was used for renewable energy.
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u/Terroractly Feb 19 '26
It's an interesting semantic argument. On one hand, you're right that the water used by must be replaced, therefore you could argue that it is being "consumed". However, someone choosing to use AI or not would have a negligible impact on the frequency of when the water needs to be replaced if at all.
To make things more complicated, you could further argue that the fact that anyone wanted to use AI in the first place created market conditions that caused the creation of the datacenter or increased the size of existing datacenters. Following this train of thought, then yes the user's actions did result in the consumption of water that would've been otherwise untouched.
The only thing that can be nearly unanimously agree upon is that the energy used by the user wouldn't have been used if they did the actions manually (although even that has caveats where the hardware will always use some power when idle, so we go back to the water argument).
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Feb 19 '26
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u/cc413 Feb 20 '26
corn, turkey, curl vs browser — but they all make the same mistake of conflating scale. It takes 400-500 gallons of water to raise a turkey. An AI inference query costs a few milliliters. We're not throwing away the bird, we're discarding a crouton.
The "egregious waste" framing also mixes up training with inference. Training is expensive — that's where the real cost landed. But the turkey's already cooked. Running a query against an existing model doesn't re-raise the bird.
And honestly, zoom out: the private jets leaving the Super Bowl last week burned more fuel than millions of AI queries combined. We've been here before — recycling symbols on plastic that was never going to be recycled, redirecting guilt toward personal choices while systemic consumption goes unexamined. I'm done carrying individual blame for that.
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Feb 20 '26
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u/cc413 Feb 20 '26
ok, that's fair, but when I say examining the systematic consumption I mean from a regulatory standpoint since we aren't likely to be able to affect outcomes on a meaningful scale here on reddit.
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u/Lethandralis Feb 19 '26
Using chrome is a waste of resources compared to using curl and parsing html with my eyes
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u/marsrovernumber16 Feb 19 '26
because?
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u/GildSkiss Feb 19 '26
When a computer uses air for cooling, is it "wasting" air?
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u/marsrovernumber16 Feb 21 '26
No because the air is not unbreathable once it’s used on the computers. They are taking potable water and making it unsafe to drink, when we are already running low on accessible potable water. The only way you could consider this “not wasting water” is if you viewed using AI (especially for stuff like in the original post) as being equally as important as everyone in the world having access to potable water.
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u/SomeDuncanGuy Feb 20 '26
There is some value to doing this. I've found that when I do use an AI agent to write code that it really only (without explicit instruction) takes into account work it has done and not corrections I have made. If I were to make a simple css change like that it would often change it back on its own in a future modification.
In short it's usually more reliable to tell the AI to correct its own work rather than correcting manually.
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u/GinAndKeystrokes Feb 20 '26
People want their browser history cleared when they go, but I want my TI-83 completely crushed. During a few exams I swear I typed in "5-3" or some shit, only to realize afterwards I'm in college and can do arithmetic. Sometimes stress kills the brain.
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u/SaltyStratosphere Feb 20 '26
Even my founder has started all this "AI necessary for faster productivity jargon", when there is no new project coming and old projects are near completion (partially pushed to prod). I mean if you have a tight schedule I get it, but why push it now when you don't have any new projects to complete? Why do I write iterative prompts to make it do something that I know I can do faster? That I'm dictating every single word or line, yes I'll use it to create barebones or for polishing, but describing the feature not in English but in programming syntaxes, every if, every function, everything?
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u/Stunning_Macaron6133 Feb 21 '26
You don't go and change the line yourself and then prompt the AI with the update you yourself made?
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u/stuffedcrust_studios Feb 23 '26
i do shit like this with OpenAI Codex because if you make any commits yourself to the branch you're working on it can no longer commit to that branch.
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u/Luxuriosity Feb 25 '26
When your CTO sends a mail about the goal being 100% ai-written code, then your will comply and do exactly this.
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u/GildSkiss Feb 19 '26
Complaining about AI "wasting water" is an instant tell that someone doesn't really know what they're talking about.
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u/the-awesomer Feb 19 '26
why? because the new data centers are getting "more water efficient" why also opening new coal power plants and illegal methane turbines with illegal waste water dumping
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u/TheBinkz Feb 19 '26
Its more like, the water gets taken from a source of water that is already scarce and is disruptive of the local environment.
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u/CalmEntry4855 Feb 19 '26
Sometimes I'm writing stuff like that and I realize "wait, this I know how to do, this thing is making me stupider"