Thread

1. tolugenius · 1790091450 · 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 · 1790092249 · 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. lxgr · 1790099670 · focus · HN ↗

         Arguably determinism has gone out of the window a while ago in most software engineering. These days, you can be as imprecise in nominally formal languages as you can be in skill files.

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