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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#151

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

> 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.”

It's insane to me that someone can arrive at any other conclusion. LLMs very obviously put out bad code, and you have no idea where it is in their output. So you have to review it all.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#152

Post by impulser_ »

I think this post should be directed to every Typescript developer.

I think a lot of this is just Typescript developers. I bet if you removed them from the equation most of the problem he's writing about go away. Typescript developers didn't even understand what React was doing without agent, now they are just one-shot prompting features, web apps, clis, desktop apps and spitting it out to the world.

The prime example of this is literally Anthropic. They are pumping out features, apps, clis and EVERY single one of them release broken.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#153

Post by bigstrat2003 »

I really don't get the author's conclusion here. I agree with his premises: organizations using LLMs to churn out software are turning out terrible quality software. But the conclusion from that shouldn't be "slow down", it should be "this tool isn't currently fit for use, don't use it". It feels like the author starts from the premise of "I want to use AI" and is trying to figure out how to make that work, rather than "I want to make good software" and trying to figure out how to do that.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#154

Post by fantasizr »

Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

this is a good point. Some of the ai companies are trying to hook cs students so they'll only know "dev" as a function of their products. First one's free as they say (the drug dealers).

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#155

Post by nradov »

somethingsome wrote: post #86
kemiller2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Computer Science (kind of a misnomer) should be in the faculty of Mathematics. Software Development should be in the faculty of Performing Arts. Informatics should be in the faculty of Business Administration.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#156

Post by bigstrat2003 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #119
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 a great shout because I'm sure a lot of people would otherwise just discredit this take as just another anti-ai skeptic. But he probably has more experience working with LLM's and agents than most of us on this site, so his opinion holds more weight than most.

If you were going to dismiss an argument because of who it comes from rather than its content, that is a flaw in your thinking. The argument is correct, or it isn't, no matter who said it.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#157

Post by alecbz »

bdangubic wrote: post #54
pixl97 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever Air Traffic Controller software - sure. 99% of other softwares around that are not mission-critical (like Facebook) just punch it to production - "move fast and break shit" has been cool way before "AI"

There's a lot of software in between Air Traffic Controller and Facebook. And honestly would Meta be okay with Instagram or Facebook going down even for just a few minutes? I'd think at this point that'd be considered a fairly severe incident.

Even if we ignore criticality, things just get really messy and confusing if you push a bunch of broken stuff and only try to start understanding what's actually going on after it's already causing issues.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#158

Post by aduitsis »

nradov wrote: post #147
skybrian wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And maybe it's dangerous for one to think they're doing engineering when in reality they're doing craft work.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#159

Post by whaleofatw2022 »

pydry wrote: post #49
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…

>After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. That's increasingly not possible. This is the first time for me in 20 years where I've had a programming tool rammed down my throat. There's a crisis of software developer autonomy and it's actually hurting software productivity. We're making worse software, slower because the C levels have bought this fairy tale that you can replace 5 dev…

That lucky?

In 18 years AI is the third or 4th tool forced upon a shop/team, I will say of those it is the forst one that is genuinely able to make me more productive overall, even with the drawbacks.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#160

Post by ryandrake »

perrygeo wrote: post #145
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…

> 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 sha…

> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly?

Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them.

It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. Every other thing they do is a side quest or some strategic thing they think might convince analysts to make their stock price to move.

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