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.
> But what if we start normalizing failures in the libraries, the infrastructure, and the compilers?
There is no reason why the quality of a product should be constrained or gated by the quality of the programmer who first types in the code. Even before AI you might have interns and senior programmers working together, right?
Testing, qa procedures, iterative/recursive development methodologies, even just good taste. I think the list of religions variously followed and/or litigated over by the diverse HN crowd over the years before ai is ... long.
So now you have a couple of PFYs who you've suspiciously never encountered at lunch.
And?
Yes the new PFYs are still like cats. Yes it's still a headache trying to herd them in chat. And yes some days they suck, so you need to send back half of their work. But you're in charge of the process and overall quality, right?
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.
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
There is no reason why the quality of a product should be constrained or gated by the quality of the programmer who first types in the code. Even before AI you might have interns and senior programmers working together, right?
Testing, qa procedures, iterative/recursive development methodologies, even just good taste. I think the list of religions variously followed and/or litigated over by the diverse HN crowd over the years before ai is ... long.
So now you have a couple of PFYs who you've suspiciously never encountered at lunch.
And?
Yes the new PFYs are still like cats. Yes it's still a headache trying to herd them in chat. And yes some days they suck, so you need to send back half of their work. But you're in charge of the process and overall quality, right?