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Firebase SDK is crashing all iOS apps since this morning

135 points · 72 comments · pranshuchittora

  1. rvz · · focus · HN ↗
    Keep vibe coding and breaking everything.

    This will be the new normal as all human “engineers” from staff to seniors are now down levelled to interns and junior engineers when using AI; unable to understand what they are doing and pushing broken updates like this into production with “agents”.

    Better not blame Claude on this outage.

    1. pranshuchittora · · focus · HN ↗
      No matter who writes the code, the name in the commit is responsible as well as the person who approved / reviewed the PR.
      1. swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
        The coding side of this isn't even the problem - that a broken change like this made it to production is an operational failure.

        Why didn't testing catch this? Why was there no canary? How come alarms didn't wake up an on call as soon as the call-volume on the backend dropped? Why was this update rolled out to every customer at once, instead of gradually?

        1. pranshuchittora · · focus · HN ↗
          I think verification is still a grey area in the agentic software dev. QA and ppl testing it often resort to coding agents for the QA work, and we all know how good agents are at convincing themselves.
          1. pranshuchittora · · focus · HN ↗
            -
            1. 2muchcoffeeman · · focus · HN ↗
              The solution is testing it yourself, not more AI
        2. gib444 · · focus · HN ↗
          Why pay for and bother with all of that when you can outsource it to your users?

          Users who will forget about it, and due to inertia stay on your platform.

      2. lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
        No matter how many times this is said, the reality is that it is not true: no one will get blamed if the AI can be blamed.
        1. darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
          Wrong. They will be totally blamed. And the pushback will be that management forced me to use AI and go fast. Then, management will be the one NOT being blamed for this.
      3. Macha · · focus · HN ↗
        And in many companies, if they move at a responsible speed (rather than the speed the AI vendors promise, if you let their tools work in yolo mode), that person will get replaced by someone who will just yolo it
      4. fernandotakai · · focus · HN ↗
        there's a LOT of push from vibecoders to stop with PR reviews.

        i've also heard "the prompt is the only thing that should be reviewed"

      5. PunchyHamster · · focus · HN ↗
        Just blaming AI seems to be the norm now, we have companies literally hacking other companies by "rogue LLM" and not getting any responsibility for it
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