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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#71

Post by 01284a7e »

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…

All (not some) of the most successful devs I've known in the sense of building something that found market fit and making money off it were terrible engineers. They were fairly productive at building features. That's it. And they were productive - until they weren't. Their work ultimately led to outages, lost data, and sensitive data being leaked (to what extent, I don't even know).

The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.

Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#72

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

Software was an engineering discipline... at some places. And it still is, at some places.

Other places were "hack it until we don't know of any major bugs, then ship it before someone finds one". And now they're "hey, AI agents - we can use that as a hack-o-matic!" But they were having trouble with sustainability before, and they're going to still, except much faster.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#74

Post by latchkey »

bikelang wrote: post #40
latchkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

Were people reviewing your hobby projects previously? Were you on-call for your hobby website? If not - then it sounds like nothing changed?

This is my business website.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#75

Post by abletonlive »

guzfip wrote: post #47
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.

> Name a single time doomers were right about anything. - NFTs - Surveillance schizos - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Anyone who didn’t believe we were a year out from Star Trek living when LLMs first started picking up steam - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and…

- NFTS doomers? I mean I appreciate the humor here.

- Surveillance schizos - Society still works

- Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Again, funny use of 'doomers' but that's what the current society seems to be run by so I wouldn't say it's fitting for doomerism.

- People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and demand to ever be a real concern.

   -- I'm a software "engineer" for ~14 years now. I still have no concern.
None of these things are that disruptive to our society at large. You will still be able to walk down the street and grab a Big Mac pretty much any day of the week. A large portion of society is going to look at all of what you're worried about and say "it's not that serious" while consuming their 20 second videos.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#76

Post by latchkey »

jon-wood wrote: post #48
latchkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

There's a middle ground here. Code for your website? Sure, whatever, I assume you're not Dell and the cost of your website being unavailable to some subset of users for a minute doesn't have 5 zeroes on the end of it. If you're writing code being used by something that matters though you better be getting that stuff reviewed because LLMs can and will make absolutely ridiculous mistakes.

> There's a middle ground here.

I'm responding to this statement: "Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever."

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#77

Post by embedding-shape »

anthk wrote: post #59
SoftTalker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In Europe they are. Call yourself an Engineer without a degree and your company and you will be sued with a big fine, because here you must be legally accountable on disasters and ofc there are hard constraints .

> In Europe they are

Where specifically? I've been working as a "Software engineer" for multiple decades, across three countries in Europe, and 2-3 countries outside of Europe, never been sued or received a "big fine" for this, even have had presentations for government teams and similar, not a single person have reacted to me (or others) calling ourselves "software engineers" this whole time.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#78

Post by alecbz »

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…

How do you know which lines you need to review and which you don't?

Does it feel archaic because LLMs are clearly producing output of a quality that doesn't require any review, or because having to review all the code LLMs produce clips the productivity gains we can squeeze out of them?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#79

Post by latchkey »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #42
latchkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

That a personal website? Prod means different things in different contexts. Even then, I'd be a bit worried about prompt injection unless you control your context closely (no web access etc).

Prompt injection?! Give me an example.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#80

Post by AnimalMuppet »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #69
SoftTalker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Depends on the country. In some countries, it is a legal axiom (or at least identity).

For the other countries, though, arguing "some countries do it that way" is as persuasive as "some countries drive on the other side of the road." It's true, but so what? Why should we change to do it their way?

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