One of my alltime favourite jokes in the context of software engineering is:
“There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.”
I recently discovered it came from a post on X.
It’s been 16 years since it first came out, and there’s finally a small update we can make:
16 years later, we’ve finally solved off-by-1 errors with the help of agents. Unfortunately, we replaced them with AI slop. Two hard problems remain.
P.S. I appreciate that while writing this, antigravity gave up with this one on the fly:
A SQL query walks into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, “Can I join you?”