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.
However, we are not (yet) building probabilistic libraries right? Even if AI is used, the code it builds is still deterministic and will fail in a way that can be fixed.
Not unlike legacy code, where the original developers are long gone and no one knows when that system breaking bug is about to wake up.
Even in the best of cases tho, fully human written and reviewed code will still fail eventually.
So I would say we are not normalizing failures (yet) but rather normalizing legacy.
We've been using probabilistic algorithms a long time now, also known as randomised algorithms. You probably won't find a program that is not using a hash table.
Compilers actually actively try to stay deterministic in their output.
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.
jtafurth · · focus · HN ↗
Not unlike legacy code, where the original developers are long gone and no one knows when that system breaking bug is about to wake up.
Even in the best of cases tho, fully human written and reviewed code will still fail eventually.
So I would say we are not normalizing failures (yet) but rather normalizing legacy.
legulere · · focus · HN ↗
Compilers actually actively try to stay deterministic in their output.
jtafurth · · focus · HN ↗