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The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures

277 points · 124 comments · pxx

  1. pmarreck · · focus · HN ↗
    I am big on reproducibility (nix aficionado) and determinism (flagging test failures are a red-alert, all-hands-on-deck situation in my world) and correctness.

    I am also big on testing (the correct things). And nine-nines (big on Elixir).

    And... I'm also big on agent-assisted dev. Which requires pretty much every check in the book to stay productive in. And that's fine to me. I've seen bugs that I wouldn't have made myself. And I've also seen my own bugs fixed. They've all gotten fixed in short order. I don't see why this is a problem.

    Raise your personal standards.

    Thing is, the unreliable-software situation was already untenable before agents (in poor hands) made it worse.

    1. lokar · · focus · HN ↗
      I don’t think the author (or many people) doubt that one can (and some will) find a way that does not “suck”

      But it’s pretty clear that most people are not. For whatever reasons (mgmt pressure, trying to get ahead, skill issues, etc) they half ass it, accept the 10% (silent) fail rate and blame the bad outcomes on the AI as if that absolves them. Or, adopt the attitude that 10% fail is fine, and people who say otherwise are being picky, or are anti-ai luddites or whatever. You should accept that things will suck.

      1. gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
        If you took a bad but functional AI generated service and transported it back to 2018 it would have been at worst just mediocre. People do seem forget how dreadful devslop was in the past. I'd take an AI generated mess to disentangle every time over a spaghetti codebase that grew organically in the hands of careless managers.
        1. thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
          But as more and more things depend on increasingly deep software stacks, everything goes to utter shit if the individual systems don't become more reliable.
          1. gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
            If you asked management they'd say that's "business risk"
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