Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 505 posts

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#61

Post by PaulHoule »

badlibrarian wrote: post #37
latchkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era Aren't you conveniently ignoring the fact that there were people saw through that and didn't go down those routes?

Change it to "Some people" if your pedanticism won't let you follow the flow. Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via…

There's this interesting issue that we've never had occupational licensing for software developers despite the sheer incompetence that we see all the time.

On one hand there's an approach to computing where it is a branch of mathematics that is universal. There are some creatures that live under the ice on a moon circling a gas giant around another star and if they have computers they are going to understand the halting problem (even if they formulate it differently) and know bubble sort is O(N^2) and about algorithms that sort O(N log N).

On the other hand we are divided by communities of practice that don't like one another. For instance there is the "OO sux" brigade which thinks I suck because I like Java. There still are shops where everything is done in a stored procedure (oddly like the fashionable architecture where you build an API server just because... you have to have an API) and other shops where people would think you were brain damaged to go anywhere near stored procs, triggers or any of that. It used to be Linux enthusiasts thought anybody involved in Windows was stupid and you'd meet Windows admins who were click-click-click-click-clicking over and over again to get IIS somewhat working who thought IIS was the only web server good enough for "the enterprise"

Now apart for the instinctual hate for the tools there really are those chronic conceptual problems for which datetime is the poster child. I think every major language has been through multiple datetime libraries in and out of the standard lib in the last 20 years because dates and times just aren't the simple things that we wish they would be and the school of hard knocks keeps knocking us to accept a complicated reality.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#62

Post by abletonlive »

lpcvoid wrote: post #41
abletonlive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. I'm one of those people and I'm not going to slow down. I want to move on from bullshit jobs. The only people that fear what is coming are thos…

That's a mighty high horse you are riding there

Ah yes, me on a high horse. Not the person whose entire worldview depends on defying nash equilibrium. You're all wasting brain cycles to discuss some unrealistic cooperative agreement to slow down and sing 'kumbaya' and telling us that if we don't get to this state that we will on the streets homeless. If this is me on a horse then you are on top of an ivory tower managing my beast of burden.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#64

Post by chermi »

brightball wrote: post #51
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had jobs where my title was “software engineer”, but I never refer to myself as such outside of work. When I tell others what I do, I say I am a software developer. It may seem a pointless distinction, but to me there is a distinction. Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”. The people that make bridges and building…

I was won over by this distinction from another senior some years ago. I think he said… “Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.” I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.

I was just reading "how the world became rich" and they made an interesting distinction economic "development" vs plain "growth". Amusingly, "development" to them means exactly what you're saying "engineer" should mean. It's sustainable, structural, not ephemeral. Development in the abstract hints at foundational work. Building something up to last. It seems like this meaning degradation is common in software. It still blows my mind how the "full-stack" naming stuck, for example.

https://www.howtheworldbecamerich.com/

Edit-on a related note, are there any studies on the all-in long-term cost between companies that "develop" vs. "engineer". I doubt there would be clean data since the managers that ignored all of the warning of "tech debt" would probably have the say on both compiling and releasing such data.

Does the cost of "tech-debt" decrease as the cost of "coding" decreased or is there a phase transition on the quality of the code? I bet there will be an inflection point if you plotted the adoption time of AI coding by companies. Late adapters that timed it after the models and harnesses and practices were good enough (probably still some time in the near future) would have less all-in cost per same codebase quality.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#65

Post by abletonlive »

margalabargala wrote: post #52
abletonlive wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a single time doomers were right about anything. Doomers consistently overstate their expected outcome in every single domain and consistently fail to predict how society evolves and adapts. Again: The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.

Climate change would be a big one. Also, there have been plenty of awful things caused by technological progress. Tons of death and poverty was created by the transition to factories and mechanization 150 years ago. Did we come out the other end with higher living standards? Yes, but that doesn't make the decades of brutal transition period any less awful for those affected.

> Climate change would be a big one.

That's generous. Climate scientists were right, climate doomers were definitely wrong.

Society is mostly unchanged due to climate change. That's not to say climate has no effect, but it is certainly still not some doomer scenario that's played out. New York and Florida are most certainly not underwater as predicted by the famous "Inconvenient Truth". People still live in deserts just as they always have. Human lifespan is still increasing. We have less hunger worldwide than ever before, etc.

Climate change doomers conveniently leave out the part where climate has ALWAYS affected society and is one of the main inputs to our existence, therefore we are extremely adaptable to it.

Before "climate change" ever entered the general consciousness, climate wiped out civilizations MORE FREQUENTLY than it does now. All signs point to doomers being wrong and yet they all hold onto it stubbornly.

Doomers were never impressive because they got anything right, they are impressive because they have the unique skill of moving the goalpost when they are wrong. Any time you think the goalpost can't be moved further out, they prove it's possible.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#66

Post by bensyverson »

bluGill wrote: post #12
ketzo wrote: post #6

I think the core idea here is a good one. But in many agent-skeptical pieces, I keep seeing this specific sentiment that “agent-written code is not production-ready,” and that just feels… wrong! It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.” Yes, there are still iss…

Maybe in the future humans won't need to pour over every line. However I quickly learn which interns I can trust and which I need to pour over their code - I don't trust AI because it has been wrong too often. I'm not saying AI is useless - I do most of my coding with an agent, but I don't trust it until I verify every line.

I did this for a while… and until Opus 4.5, I couldn't fully trust the model. But at this point, while it does make the occasional mistake, I don't need to scrutinize every line. Unit and integration tests catch the bugs we can imagine, and the bugs we can't imagine take us by surprise, which is how it has always been.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#67

Post by windowliker »

SoftTalker wrote: post #44

> Companies claiming 100% of their product's code is now written by AI consistently put out the worst garbage you can imagine. Not pointing fingers, but memory leaks in the gigabytes, UI glitches, broken-ass features, crashes One thing about the old days of DOS and original MacOS: you couldn't get away with nearly as much of this. The whole computer would crash hard and need to be rebooted, all unsaved work lost. You…

Another factor at work is the use of rolling updates to fix things that should better have been caught with rigorous testing before release. Before the days of 'always on' internet it was far too costly to fix something shipped on physical media. Not that everything was always perfect, but on the whole it was pretty well stress-tested before shipping.

The sad truth is that now, because of the ease of pushing your fix to everything while requiring little more from the user than that their machine be more or less permanently connected to a network, even an OS is dealt with as casually as an application or game.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#68

Post by latchkey »

PaulHoule wrote: post #61
badlibrarian wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change it to "Some people" if your pedanticism won't let you follow the flow. Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via…

There's this interesting issue that we've never had occupational licensing for software developers despite the sheer incompetence that we see all the time. On one hand there's an approach to computing where it is a branch of mathematics that is universal. There are some creatures that live under the ice on a moon circling a gas giant around another star and if they have computers they are going to understand the halt…

> There's this interesting issue that we've never had occupational licensing for software developers despite the sheer incompetence that we see all the time.

I'm laughing over the current Delve/SOC2 situation right now. Everyone pulls for 'licenses' as the first card, but we all know that is equally fraught with trauma. https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#69

Post by JoshTriplett »

SoftTalker wrote: post #29
badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was. It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements to be a "software engineer." There are none. A 12 year old can call himself a software engineer and there are probably some who have managed to get remote work on major projects.

> It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements

That's assuming the axiom that "engineer" must require licensing requirements. That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.

Some kinds of building software may be "engineering", some kinds may not be, but anyone seeking to argue that "licensing requirements" should come into play will have to actually argue that rather than treat it as an unstated axiom.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#70

Post by latchkey »

badlibrarian wrote: post #37
latchkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era Aren't you conveniently ignoring the fact that there were people saw through that and didn't go down those routes?

Change it to "Some people" if your pedanticism won't let you follow the flow. Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via…

> pedanticism

  Pedanticism (or pedantry) is the excessive, tiresome concern for minor details, literal accuracy, or formal rules, often at the expense of understanding the broader context.
I don't think this had anything to do with minor details at all. You're trying to convey a point while ignoring the half of the population who didn't go down that route.
Post reply on HN