> It’s actually fine if agents make a lot of boneheaded mistakes. What’s not ok is if they keep making the same mistakes.
I worked in life sciences for a bit. There is a process in clinical trials called corrective and preventative actions (CAPA). You'll also find this in other areas where failure tolerance is low (e.g. aircraft).
It's simple: when a mistake happens, you run your CAPA process (Google CAPA form and see examples to extrapolate what that process might look like) and determine the root cause and the correction to the process that allowed the mistake to happen in the first place.
(At least as a SaaS vendor in life sciences, when we had a CAPA (e.g. after a SEV0 failure), it would be folded into our SOPs and then we would be required to retrain on the SOP. Auditors would want to see our evidence of CAPAs, the versions of our SOPs, the records of training. All to extreme for most shops, but I add this for context/color)
This is something most eng shops do not have the discipline for since it requires some diligence.
Should it be fully agentic? Should there be human intervention here to approve the CAPA? Open questions to be answered.
Every place I've worked at has positioned their SEV review process as 'blameless' with respect to the engineers who created the code, processes, etc that led to the incident. On paper, it's not about pointing fingers (though I've found this to be somewhat idealistic), but about finding faults in the processes that let bad code slip through the cracks.
It will be interesting to see how the notion of 'responsibility' carries over as agents handle higher and higher levels of abstraction. Agents built using the popular frameworks of today are somewhere in between code, formerly written by engineers, and an actor (like an engineer). When an agent wrote the framework to audit and monitor ops agents who are monitoring the performance and reliability of the code that coding agents wrote, who is responsible for ultimately ensuring it doesn't happen again? Should the findings just be added to whatever RAG and a few prompts/hooks/skills changed by another agent? When does a human follow up and to what degree?
This is the sort of thing that makes me believe that software engineers will never truly go away; at the very least, they serve the very useful function of being ultimately responsible for something going wrong.
CharlieDigital · · focus · HN ↗
It's simple: when a mistake happens, you run your CAPA process (Google CAPA form and see examples to extrapolate what that process might look like) and determine the root cause and the correction to the process that allowed the mistake to happen in the first place.
(At least as a SaaS vendor in life sciences, when we had a CAPA (e.g. after a SEV0 failure), it would be folded into our SOPs and then we would be required to retrain on the SOP. Auditors would want to see our evidence of CAPAs, the versions of our SOPs, the records of training. All to extreme for most shops, but I add this for context/color)
This is something most eng shops do not have the discipline for since it requires some diligence.
Should it be fully agentic? Should there be human intervention here to approve the CAPA? Open questions to be answered.
jeffnash · · focus · HN ↗
It will be interesting to see how the notion of 'responsibility' carries over as agents handle higher and higher levels of abstraction. Agents built using the popular frameworks of today are somewhere in between code, formerly written by engineers, and an actor (like an engineer). When an agent wrote the framework to audit and monitor ops agents who are monitoring the performance and reliability of the code that coding agents wrote, who is responsible for ultimately ensuring it doesn't happen again? Should the findings just be added to whatever RAG and a few prompts/hooks/skills changed by another agent? When does a human follow up and to what degree?
This is the sort of thing that makes me believe that software engineers will never truly go away; at the very least, they serve the very useful function of being ultimately responsible for something going wrong.