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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#81

Post by alecbz »

bikelang wrote: post #32
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…

Were you not reviewing every line when a human wrote it before it went to prod? I think the output of these tools is about as good as a human would write - which means it needs thorough review if I’m going to be on the hook to resolve its issues at 2AM.

Yeah in many places we had two humans with context on every line, and now we're advocating going to zero?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#82

Post by postexitus »

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…

You sound like you are working on unimportant stuff. Sure, go ahead, push.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#84

Post by MisterTea »

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…

> Modern OSes with virtual memory and multitasking and user isolation are a lot more tolerant of shit code, so we are getting more of it.

It's not the glut of compute resources, we've already accepted bloat in modern software. The new crutch is treating every device as "always online" paired with mantra of "ship now! push fixes later." Its easier to setup a big complex CI pipeline you push fixes into and it OTA patches the users system. This way you can justify pushing broken unfinished products to beat your competitors doing the same.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#85

Post by bobthepanda »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #24
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…

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patte…

It’s a bit of a misclassification. In my mind we tend to be more like architects where there are a fair amount of innovative ideas that don’t work all that well in practice. Train stations with beautiful roofs that leak and slippery marble floors, airports with smoke ventilation systems in the floor, etc.

Of course, we use that term for something else in the software world, but architecture really has two tiers, the starchitects building super fancy stuff (equivalent to what we’d call software architects) and the much more normal ones working on sundry things like townhomes and strip malls.

That being said I don’t think people want the architecture pay grades in the software fields.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#86

Post by somethingsome »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #24
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…

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patte…

At the same time, if you remove 'engineer' , informatics should fall under the faculty of Science, so scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;)

Maybe software tinkerer?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#87

Post by skybrian »

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…

People don't realize how much software engineering has improved. I remember when most teams didn't use version control, and if we did have it, it was crappy. Go through the Joel Test [1] and think about what it was like at companies where the answers to most of those questions was "no."

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#88

Post by sehugg »

simonw wrote: post #27

Useful context here is that the author wrote Pi, which is the coding agent framework used by OpenClaw and is one of the most popular open source coding agent frameworks generally.

That's hilarious. I've been following Mario since his work on libGDX and RoboVM.

His blog post on pi is here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#89

Post by JoshTriplett »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #80
JoshTriplett wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

As I said, "That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.". The law is emphatically not an axiom, nor is it definitionally right or wrong, or correct or incorrect; it only defines what's legal or illegal.

When the article raised the question of whether "building software is an engineering discipline", it was very obviously not asking a question about whether the term 'engineering' is legally restricted in any particular jurisdiction.

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