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How many of you have asked about a process and been told that nobody knows how it works because the person who developed it left the company?
There was a blog post at the top of HN about this, like, yesterday.
I hate the current AI hype hothouse and everything it seems to be doing to the industry... but I couldn't help but laugh.
The post is great. Bus factor of zero is a great coinage.
I think the article underestimates how much intent can be grasped from code alone. Even without comments. Humans (and I strongly suspect LLMs, since they're statistical synthesis of human production) are fairly predictable. We tend to tackle the same problems the same way. So how something is solved, tells you a lot about why, who and when it was solved. Still, it's a valid point that much of the knowledge is now obs…
I agree, the human thought process always ends up getting embedded in a which of several possible ways any one thing might be done. But it's still a process, and a vastly inferior one to having a knowledgeable person on hand. Reverse-engineering has up until now been reserved to times when it is necessary. (I mean, we all still do it, especially on legacy codebases, but it's not good for productivity at all.)
> Humans (and I strongly suspect LLMs, since they're statistical synthesis of human production) are fairly predictable.
I disagree with the parenthetical. That's what stands out to me the most about LLM code: there are definitely intentions embedded in the code, but they're a hodgepodge of different intentions all tangled up together. You can't infer much of anything from a small snippet, because the intention behind that snippet was likely relevant to a completely different origin codebase that was piled up into a compost heap to grow an LLM out of. It's actually harder to make sense of an LLM codebase because the intentions distract and confuse the reader -- just as with text, we implicitly assume that a generated artifact means the same thing as if a human wrote it, and it doesn't.
Unfortunately the corporate machine has been converging on a bus factor of 0. I've been part of multiple teams now where I was the only one holding knowledge over critical subsystems and whenever I attempted to train people on it, it was futile. Mainly because they would get laid off doing 'cost-savings measures'. There were times where I was close to getting fed up and just quitting during some of the high profile o…
This guy thinks bus factors of zero started with ChatGPT. Hahahahahaha. Adorable. How many of you have asked about a process and been told that nobody knows how it works because the person who developed it left the company? There was a blog post at the top of HN about this, like, yesterday. I hate the current AI hype hothouse and everything it seems to be doing to the industry... but I couldn't help but laugh. The po…
This guy thinks bus factors of zero started with ChatGPT. Hahahahahaha. Adorable. How many of you have asked about a process and been told that nobody knows how it works because the person who developed it left the company? There was a blog post at the top of HN about this, like, yesterday. I hate the current AI hype hothouse and everything it seems to be doing to the industry... but I couldn't help but laugh. The po…