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.
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.
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.
Volume has nothing to do with it, this is discussing code quality. But if you mind me saying so, blame this ridiculous amount of codeslop volume on greedy managers and corpocrats. Developers are artists, they usually ship shitcode when they're under pressure
volume has everything to do with this. We used to make fun of how overengineered projects can be with stuff like HelloWorld Enterprise Edition, and now we just shrug at that because it's made fast?
No it's because shrugging it off or not is the topic of another discussion. Code quality and noise ratio and absolute noise volume are completely orthogonal in a sense that you can discuss code quality separately to how you deal with a large volume of slop. This discussion is about the former and you are forcing it to be about the later, which is interesting but unrelated.
pmarreck · · focus · HN ↗
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.
lokar · · focus · HN ↗
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.
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
It was dreadful, but the volume was a single-digit percentage of what you see now.
Even those develoeprs who made a living opying from SO *still needed to make that code work for their system!"
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
gchamonlive · · focus · HN ↗