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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
141–150 of 505 posts
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I'll read the diffs after the fact and have fix AI it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That sounds better. I assume the stakes are low enough that you are happy reviewing after the fact, but setting up a workflow to check the diffs before pushing to production shouldn't be too difficult
Of course. I could do a PR review process, but what's the point. It is just a static website.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#143Earlier 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.
Prod in this context doesn't refer to one person's website for their personal project. It refers to an environment where downtime has consequences, generally one that multiple people work on and that many people rely on.
It is not a personal project.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#144I 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 say it's borderline archaic. I say trusting agents enough to not look at every single line is an abdication of ethics, safety, and engineering. You're just absolving yourself of any problems. I hope you aren't working in medical devices or else we're going to get another Therac-25. Please have some sort of ethics. You are going to kill people with your attitude.
Almost nobody works on medical devices... And some of you lucky folks might be working with mega minds everyday, but the rest of us are but shadows and dust. I trust 5.4 or 4.6 more than most developers. Through applying specific pressure using tests and prompts I force it to built better code for my silly hobby game than I ever saw in real production software. Before those models I was still on the other side of the line but the writing is on the wall.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#145I 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…
> What are you building?
This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs?
Hard to shake the feeling that this looks like one big pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering.
> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.
It was, and is. But not universally.
If you formulate questions scientifically and use the answers to make decisions, that's engineering. I've seen it happen. It can happen with LLMs, under the proper guidance.
If you formulate questions based on vibes, ignore the answers, and do what the CEO says anyway, that's not engineering. Sadly, I've seen this happen far too often. And with this mindset comes the Claudiot mindset - information is ultimately useless so fake autogenerated content is just as valuable as real work.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#146I 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 engineering is real engineering because we rigorously engineer software the way real engineers engineer real things.
Software engineering is not real engineering because we do not rigorously engineer software the way "real" engineers engineer real things. Software engineering is real engineering because we "rigorously" engineer software the way "real" engineers engineer real things.
Edit: quotes imply sarcasm.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#147I 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...
Version control is useful but it has nothing to do with software engineering per se. Most software development is craft work which doesn't meet the definition of engineering (and that's usually fine). Conversely, it's possible to do real software engineering without having a modern version control system.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time, systems have become far more complex. Back when version control was crap, there weren't a thousand APIs to integrate and a million software package dependencies to manage. Sure everything seems to have gotten better and that's why we now need AIs to understand our code bases - that we created with our great version control tooling. Fundamentally we're still monkeys at keyboards just that now there a…
Perrow’s book Normal Accidents postulates that, given advances which could improve safety, people just decide to emphasize throughput, speed, profits, etc. he turned out to be wrong about aviation (got much safer over time) and maritime shipping (there was a perception of a safety crisis in the late 1970s with oil tankers exploding, now you just hear about the odd exceptional event.)
> Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.[1]
This is definitely something that is happening with software systems. The question is: is having an AI that is fundamentally undecipherable in its intention to extend these systems a good approach? Or is an approach of slowing down and fundamentally trying understand the systems we have created a better approach?
Has software become safer? Well planes don't fall from the sky but the number of zero day exploits built into our devices has vastly improved. Is this an issue? Does it matter that software is shipped broken? Only to be fixed with the next update.
I think its hard to have the same measure of safety for software. A bridge is safe because it doesn't fall down. Is email safe when there is spam and phishing attacks? Fundamentally Email is a safe technology only that it allows attacks via phishing. Is that an Email safety problem? Probably not just as as someone having a car accident on a bridge is generally not a result of the bridge.
I think that we don't learn from our mistakes. As developers we tend to coat over the accidents of our software. When was the last time a developer was sued for shipping broken software? When was the last time an engineer was sued for building a broken bridge? Notice that there is an incentive as engineer to build better and safer bridges, for developers those incentives don't exist.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#149I 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…
Hey Visual Basic is still there, and last time I checked it was still the goto option to do OLE Automation.
RoR is no longer at its peak, but is still have its marginal stable share of the web, while PHP gets the lion part[1]
Ok, Lotus Notes is really relic from an other era now. But it’s not a PL, so not the same kind of beast.
Well, also LLMs are different beast compared to PL. They actually really are the things that evocate the most the expression "taming the beast" when you need to deal with them. So it indeed as far away as possible of engineering as one can probably use a computer to build any automation. Maybe to stay in scientific realms ethology would be a better starting point than a background in informatics/CS to handle these stuffs.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#150I 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…
As far as I can tell, the only reason agents exist is because large context increase the probability of context poisoning, purely by the inability of these models to actually make conceptual decisions about the context.
I was interested in making a semi-automous skill improvement program for open code, and I wired up systemd to watch my skills directory; when a new skill appeared, it'd run a command prompt to improve it and cohere it to a skill specification.
It was told to make a lock file before making a skill, then remove the lock files. Multiple times it'd ignore that, make the skill, then lock and unlock on the same line. I also wanted to lock the skill from future improvements, but that context overode the skills locking, so instead I used the concept of marking the skills as readonly.
So in reality, agents only exist because of context poisoning and overlap; they're not some magicaly balm to improving the speed of work, or multiplying the effort, they simply prevent context poisoning from what's essentially subprocesses.
Once you realize that, you really have to scale back the reality because not only are they just dumb, they're not integrating any real information about what they're doing.