Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 17, 2025

• Futurism ☛ What Actually Happens When Programmers Use AI Is Hilarious, According to a New Study

  In the study, 16 programmers were given roughly 250 coding tasks and asked to either use no AI assistance, or employ what METR characterized as "early-2025 AI tools" like Anthropic's Claude and Cursor Pro. The results were surprising, and perhaps profound: the programmers actually spent 19 percent more time when using AI than when forgoing it.

• Axios ☛ Software productivity riddle: AI tools could slow programmers down

  It found that these developers believed that using AI tools helped them perform 20% faster — but they actually worked 19% slower. The study appears rigorous and well-designed, but it's small (only 16 programmers participated, completing 246 tasks).

• Sandor Dargo ☛ C++26: std::format improvements (Part 2)

  In Part 1, we explored the improvements C++26 brings to std::format — from better to_string behavior to compile-time safety checks. In this part, we look at runtime formatting, defect fixes, and support for new types like std::filesystem::path.

• Games

  • Ned Batchelder ☛ 2048: iterators and iterables | Ned Batchelder

    I wrote a low-tech terminal-based version of the classic 2048 game and had some interesting difficulties with iterators along the way.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Testing Legacy Shiny Apps: Start with Behavior, Not Code

    Your legacy Shiny app needs a makeover, but you don’t know where to start.

    Jumping straight into refactoring is like repainting a room with the furniture still inside. It’s a recipe for disaster, creating bugs and breaking features you didn’t even know existed. Many developers fall into the trap of trying to write unit tests for messy, monolithic code, only to find their tests are brittle and break with every small change.

    There is a safer approach: write acceptance tests first.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Olaf Alders ☛ On a Prettier PATH

    Knowing about your ENV variables can be really helpful. Knowing how to make them more readable can be even more helpful. Today we are going to look at some strategies for making env variables (and $PATH in particular) easier to read and easier to reason about. We’ll also touch on how to install tools like ubi and is in GitHub CI and take a quick peek at how using $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY can provide a quality of life improvement for those of us looking at CI logs.

• Java

  • The Register UK ☛ Nearly 3 out of 4 Oracle Java users got audited in 3 years

    A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73 percent have been audited in the last three years. Java

    At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor's development and runtime environments.