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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#291

Post by confidantlake »

mettamage wrote: post #173
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/a…

I am not convinced that just starting early is all there is to it. I started Math, Sports, and Piano at like 6 years old but there are still plenty of "10x " people that figuratively and literally run circles around me. Talent is a real thing.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#292

Post by gitgud »

wwilson wrote: post #95
foobarqux wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it doesn't actually explain in what it does: Is it fuzzing? Do you supply your own test cases? Is it testing hardware non-determinism?

Post author here. Sorry it was vague, but there's only so much detail you can go into in a blog post aimed at general audiences. Our documentation ( https://antithesis.com/docs/ ) has a lot more info. Here's my attempt at a more complete answer: think of the story of the blind men and the elephant. There's a thing, called fuzzing, invented by security researchers. There's a thing, called property-based testing, inven…

> Your feedback about what's explained well and what's explained poorly is an important signal for us in this third very hard task. Please keep giving it to us!

It's hard to understand these complex concepts via language alone.

Diagrams would be a huge help to understand how this system of testing works compared to existing testing concepts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#293

Post by chinchilla2020 »

shermantanktop wrote: post #82

I kept cringing when I read the words “no bugs.” This is hubris in the classic style - it’s asking for a literal thunderbolt from the heavens. It may be true, but…come on. Everyone who has ever written a program has thought they were done only to find one more bug. It’s the fundamental experience of programming to asymptotically approach zero bugs but never actually get there. Again, perhaps the claim is true but it…

It's a marketing blog post, not a technical post. Something about the whole thing feels icky.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#294

Post by chinchilla2020 »

kretaceous wrote: post #22

This might be the best introduction post I've read. Lays the foundation (get it?) for who the people are and what they've built. Then explains how the current thing they are building is a result of the previous thing. It feels that they actually want this problem solved for everyone because they have experienced how good the solution feels. Then tells us about the teams (pretty big names with complex systems) that ha…

It seems like marketing copy. Not a technical blog post.

It would be nice to see some actual use cases and examples.

Instead, the writer just name-dropped a few big companies and claimed to have a revolutionary product that works magically. Then include the typical buzzwords like '10x programmer' and 'stealth mode'. The latter doesn't make sense because they also name-drop clients.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#295

Post by 6510 »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #239
didgetmaster wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule;…

This reminds me of the "Parable of the Two Programmers." [1] A story about what happens to a brilliant developer given an identical task to a mediocre developer. [1] I preserved a copy of it on my (no-advertising or monetization) blog here: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...

I had an idea once but when I tried to explain it people didn't understand.

I revisited earlier thought: communication is a 2 man job, one is to not make an effort to understand while the other explains things poorly. It always manages to never work out.

Periodically I thought about the puzzle and was eventually able to explain it such that people thought it was brilliant ~ tho much to complex to execute.

I thought about it some more, years went by and I eventually managed to make it easy to understand. The response: "If it was that simple someone else would have thought of it." I still find it hilarious decades later.

It pops to mind often when I rewrite some code and it goes from almost unreadable to something simple and elegant. Ah, this must be how someone else would have done it!

Re: Is something bugging you?

#296

Post by stavros »

This is really impressive, but still, if you're working on a piece of software where this can work, count yourself lucky. Most software I've worked on (boring line-of-business stuff) would need as many lines of code to test a behavior as to implement the behavior.

It's not very frequently that you have a behavior that's very hard to make correct, but very easy to check for correctness.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#297

Post by intuitionist »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #290
mamidon wrote: post #199

I can see how determinism can be achieved (not easy, but possible), and I can see how describing a few important system invariants can match 100's or 1000's of hand rolled tests, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it's possible to intelligently explore the inputs to generate. e.g. if I wrote a compiler, how would Antithesis generate mostly valid source code for it? Simply fuzzing utf8 inputs wouldn't get ve…

The blog post has some impressive copy but is lacking details on how you implement their product. I am highly skeptical of any claims that something 'magically just works' without much configuration or setup.

(Disclosure: I’m an Antithesis employee.)

The blog post is meant as a high-level introduction for a general audience. The documentation (https://antithesis.com/docs/) goes into considerably more detail about what kind of configuration and setup you need to start testing with Antithesis.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#298

Post by 6510 »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #289
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the "Parable of the Two Programmers." [1] A story about what happens to a brilliant developer given an identical task to a mediocre developer. [1] I preserved a copy of it on my (no-advertising or monetization) blog here: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...

Without more backup I can only describe that as being fiction. Righteous fiction, where the good guy gets downtrodden and the bad guy wins to fuel the reader's resentment.

To me it is a story about managers clueless about the work. You can make all the effort in the world to imagine doing something but the taste of the soup is in the eating. I do very simple physical grunt work for a living, there it is much more obvious that it is impossible. It's truly hilarious.

They probably deserve more praise when they do guess correctly but would anyone really know when it happens?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#299

Post by ajb »

pkghost wrote: post #286
ajb wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting - it is kind of picking a fight with SaaS/cloud providers though, as that is the one kind of software you won't be able to import into your environment: not because it can't do the job, but because you don't have the code. So this would create an incentive to go back to PaaS. It's definitely true though that a big problem with backend is that you can't easily treat it as a whole system for test pu…

> it is kind of picking a fight with SaaS/cloud providers or starting a bidding war

how so?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#300

Post by shuntress »

> a platform that takes your software and hunts for bugs in it

Ok but, what actually IS it?

It seems like it is a cloud service that will run integration tests. I have to figure out how to deploy to this special environment and I still have to write those integration tests using special libraries.

But even after all that integration refactoring, how is this supposed to help me find actual bugs that I wouldn't already have found in my own environment with my own integration tests?

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