Excellent post. People always defend agentic/LLM-driven development by saying, "Well it's good enough", or "It works most of the time."
That may be tolerable for some user-facing app. But what if we start normalizing failures in the libraries, the infrastructure, and the compilers? Everything descends into a mess of unreliability, and that slows EVERYTHING and EVERYONE down.
Banking/Finance is the one industry I've seen push back against this type of thinking. Transactions must be handled in a perfect and repeatable way, or the system is unusable as far as the company is concerned.
There's definitely still AI/LLM integration happening, but is kept out of specific areas of the business.
Same with aviation and safety. I honestly believe all programmers should, early in their careers, do a brief "tour of duty" in an industry where the stakes are high and "good enough" isn't good enough. You might not choose to make it your entire career, but at least you're exposed to the discipline, however briefly. Most software developers today have never in their lives worked on a project where defects were taken seriously and where there was process and documentation designed to reduce their occurrence.
To be fair, I'm inclined to believe that most of this pressure to lean (if not rely) on LLMs is not coming from programmers, but rather from middle and upper management: banks are resisting this not because their programmers are holding some kind of line, but because management is not giving-in to the LLM siren call. So that tour of duty, while a good idea, would be more about teaching management skills than anything else.
The normalisation of inexplicable failures is, in my opinion, the consequence of programmers being unable to refuse their managers who have fallen for the LLM siren call, lest they lose their jobs.
The difference is the failure rate and the corrective action taken when defects are found. If Boeing's software failed at 0.1% of the rate that normal web / commercial software failed, we wouldn't have a functional airline industry.
adamddev1 · · focus · HN ↗
That may be tolerable for some user-facing app. But what if we start normalizing failures in the libraries, the infrastructure, and the compilers? Everything descends into a mess of unreliability, and that slows EVERYTHING and EVERYONE down.
Root_Denied · · focus · HN ↗
There's definitely still AI/LLM integration happening, but is kept out of specific areas of the business.
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
Defletter · · focus · HN ↗
The normalisation of inexplicable failures is, in my opinion, the consequence of programmers being unable to refuse their managers who have fallen for the LLM siren call, lest they lose their jobs.
panarky · · focus · HN ↗
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗