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I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB

356 points · 170 comments · Aeroi

  1. tolugenius · · focus · HN ↗
    > About 20 Markdown files described browser use, connectors, payments, credentials, data handling, generated files, voice, goals, and scheduling.

    This the state of software engineering in 2026.

    Edit: clarified engineering to software engineering, which is more correct

    1. wccrawford · · focus · HN ↗
      You're being downvoted, but I think you've hit the nail on the head.

      So many people, especially managers, have decided they can just give the rules to the AI in English and let it make "decisions", and they think it'll do it correct every time.

      "Engineering" a few years ago meant that code was written, was (mostly) deterministic, and could be debugged. Computer processing didn't mean relying on Human-like processes, it meant relying on hard-coded logic.

      This is absolutely one of those "gets worse before it gets better" things, and will probably never go away fully now.

      Programmers know not to tell ChatGPT to do a bunch of data processing. If they use it at all, they tell it to write code that will then do the processing. It's more efficient on tokens, and if it fails, you can fix the process, instead of wondering why it went wrong, like too much context, or the LLM model version changed and doesn't work the same now, or just randomness.

      1. Tanjreeve · · focus · HN ↗
        My low level conspiracy is the reverse snobbery about knowing things is mutually beneficial for cloud providers and AI labs that both want software engineers to be as hopeless and dependent as possible so they'll consume more services/tokens and will shout down anyone saying "hey we could probably write this"
        1. mablopoule · · focus · HN ↗
          There was an article a few years ago that expressed this sentiment quite eloquently:

          > “The merchants of complexity will try to convince you that you can’t do anything yourself these days,” wrote David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails. “You can’t do auth, you can’t do scale, you can’t run a database, you can’t connect a computer to the internet. You’re a helpless peon who should just buy their wares. No. Reject.” [1]

          DHH also did a very inspiring talk about mastery and why he loved the Ruby language in the "DHH is right about everything" [2] video.

          [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;developers-rail-against-javascript-merchants-of-complexity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;developers-rail-against-javascript-me...

          [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mTa2d3OLXhg?is=nDdRHnPqHc2uiK8x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mTa2d3OLXhg?is=nDdRHnPqHc2uiK8x

          1. Tanjreeve · · focus · HN ↗
            That is very eloquent. Although they seemed to be talking about frameworks (also fair enough).
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