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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

hermit-tech.com

101–110 of 183 posts

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#101
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least once a week I have to drop what I'm doing and race in to stop the non dev manager from merging a fully vibe coded patch which will blow up production. Claude Code has made this guy a negative 10x developer.

how does this non dev manager have perms to do this

They don't have permissions but if I don't rush to block the PR with a bunch of review comments, one of the other AI brained devs will just hit approve on it without reading or understanding anything.

Yes it is hell here. But it's a new kind of problem that just showed up.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#102
post #49

Why does it have to lead to a 10x increase in revolutionary companies? Next to maintaining and expanding my own network of websites I 10xd writing boring CRUD applications for companies that were otherwise unable to afford it, making all their employees more productive. There's true economic value in that.

This is fine, but software also needs maintenance, especially security updates. If we have an explosion of new software without the corresponding increase in maintenance work - very likely from clients that pay peanuts for software - the world will be taken over by botnets and malware. It's going to be a worldwide software experiment.

I just allow access to their application only for their IP address(es) and my deployment server checks if I need to update anything. That's not expensive.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By coincidence, we've been building software for five years that other plant managers are now considering using to keep track of some operational metrics. And I don't think we should put LLMs into our development cycle, simply because the data our software is built for can have critical meaning in some situations. The insecurity in a vibe-coded web portal isn't that someone hacks it with XSS, it's that after the next…

I don't think you should keep AI away from software development for security reasons. We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. None of that is vibe coded though, so it's not like I disagree with you either. As you point out this portal isn't that, but what protects us is the processes around compliance. This can't…

> Quothling 6 months ago [1] I work in a NIS2 regulated sector and I'm not sure we can ever let any AI agent run in anything we do.

> We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems.

Please pick one. Either way this is a nightmare level of threat to sovereignty.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063153

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on what area of the world you work. We recenty had one of our plant managers build a web portal to keep track of some of our operational tech, with features you wouldn't find in standard products. I've been turning it into a container app that can actually deploy safely into our cloud infrastrcture. It's quite frankly better quality than what most external software companies have provided us with i…

I wonder how much of this "simple but bespoke" stuff would be better served with some customized off the shelf software rather than a vibe coded tool. There's not a lot of software where users dont really care if it goes wrong.

I doubt it would be better served as a customized off the shelf software. They certainly could have done it with our existing systems with SmartSheet, Microsoft Fabric and/or Power Apps with SharePoint for document storage.

From an enterprise perspective this becomes complicated for various reasons. RBAC is one area. In the perfect world you have a system to handle roles and rights to every system, something that you can give managers access to so they can maintain the access available to their employees, something linked with HR. In reality you have EntraID with a hieracy which is sort of automated by HR data, but not really, because sometimes HR puts everyone on the CEO level by mistake, and, if you trusted HR as authoritative that would've just broken all the EU laws. So you have all those Entra groups and you need IT Operations to maintain them and since you want to build it on job roles and not people you'll typically not be able to maintain them in the off the shelf system. Which means that you would have had to build a web portal for the plant managers manager where they could maintain a couple of Entra groups in a web interface. That or you'll have to setup an IT support flow where you add yet another system that IT has to maintain access for.

Then we get to the actual customization. Maybe you buy a custom API on top of your BC365 platform. Maybe your C-levels deciced that paying €50k a year to avoid outages on major updates isn't worth the cost. Then when things predictably and completely avoidable fail you're going to hav to deal with the literal shitstorm. You'd think that all the people being locked out of their jobs and the €150k cost of getting an immediate and prioritised update to the system would mean you'd start paying for that $50k service after this. You'd be wrong. Ok, to be fair, in this particular example it would be a different scenario. For a small system like this you'd find a cheap consultant house in your area and get them to build the customization for you. Only they would outsource it to some solo developer who will build it in a way that basically requires that specific person to alter it. Then when it breaks or needs to be customized futher a year down the line, that person is no longer a solo developer. So you reach out to another cheap consultant house and do it all over again, from scratch.

This doesn't even mention how poorly all those 300 off the shelf systems work together. I mean, I don't maintain a SDK delivering a way to use Apache-Arrow to write and read parquet files from our datalake in the same manner for fun. I do it because those 600 container apps which basically simply translate data from one system to another need it to be as slim as possible.

Am I jaded? Sure. But who isn't in enterprise IT?

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#105
post #4

There are some good points, and I ask the question of where is the ground breaking stuff myself, but severely weakened by * stretching the timeline: the actual real programming ability appeared in LLMs in the last 6-8 months, not 3-4 years, * using the weakest possible tool: and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits that is a far cry from Claude with Fable. Also, I know nothing about marathons but for most uses putt…

Even as someone using AI on the regular I'm starting to hate the "You didn't actually use this exact most expensive model so your point is invalid" argument. This is fair to say if someones last experience with AI was copy-pasting code into GPT3 chat windows years ago, but Deepseek is a more than capabale model and enough for someone to get an informed opinion about the technology. If people have actual counter argum…

> Even as someone using AI on the regular I'm starting to hate the "You didn't actually use this exact most expensive model so your point is invalid" argument.

What the author of the article is doing is dismissing a technology so disruptive that it's basically all everyone's talking about in the "tech space" at the moment (I mean look at HN frontpage for the past few months), by trying a relatively mediocre (but still quite good) model for about 10 seconds.

The reality is that frontier models suddenly got very good in the past 3-6 months. It has it's problems, and you need to learn how to use this new tool (as with any tool).

But models can and do generate good code. They also can and do generate absolute garbage (even Fable).

You need a good harness, tools to help the model check it's own output, good context, and a good idea of what you actually want. If you have those 4 things, the chances of generating absolute garbage are pretty slim (but yeah, still there).

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you should keep AI away from software development for security reasons. We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. None of that is vibe coded though, so it's not like I disagree with you either. As you point out this portal isn't that, but what protects us is the processes around compliance. This can't…

> Quothling 6 months ago [1] I work in a NIS2 regulated sector and I'm not sure we can ever let any AI agent run in anything we do. > We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. Please pick one. Either way this is a nightmare level of threat to sovereignty. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063153

I don't think they are opposite. We still don't let AI run anything we do. That being said, things have changed. 4 months ago I wouldn't touch the M365 Copilot thing if you paid me to, now it's basically the only AI I use professionally. Cowork changed the way we work, and I've previously spoken about how I think Microsoft sort of won the AI enterprise "war" by selling the tools and not the mode. If you'd asked me a year ago I would've been very anti AI in general. I got proven wrong. I do think it's going to be interesting to see where the EU goes with things though. Currently you can't use all features of Cowork as an example, because they are illegal in the EU. So you can't let it run your browser session for you as an example. I wonder how long that will last.

I still doubt we will ever give an AI access to run code on our systems directly though. In isolation, sure, but other than that.

This is a side note, but my personal favorite part of Cowork is that I can roll out our compliance policy to every developer as a Microsoft Teams app (no, that makes no sense to me either). So when they try to install some package that isn't pre-approved their Cowork agent won't let them and will instead explain how they might get approval. If they then continue to reference it, Cowork will even alert us.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#107
post #48

I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, n…

[dead]

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you should keep AI away from software development for security reasons. We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. None of that is vibe coded though, so it's not like I disagree with you either. As you point out this portal isn't that, but what protects us is the processes around compliance. This can't…

> Quothling 6 months ago [1] I work in a NIS2 regulated sector and I'm not sure we can ever let any AI agent run in anything we do. > We're in the European economic area and are completely NIS2 compliant and we use LLM's to aid in our software development for high risk systems. Please pick one. Either way this is a nightmare level of threat to sovereignty. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063153

> Either way this is a nightmare level of threat to sovereignty.

I agree, the EU can't become sovereign or have privacy, if the citizens constantly work against it.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#109

Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI w…

> people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do FWIW, this is not exactly new; those same people were just using other sources like Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc. before, cobbling together random code snippets, libraries, and so on without actually understanding any of that at a relevant detail level. Sure, with LLMs, one can naturally tailor this much closer to the current need (or at…

That sounds like fraud. You claimed you have knowledge of the job you got hired for, but you don't actually have.

If the company want's hire someone who doesn't have a clue and only uses SO, that's of course fine, but I doubt, that this is the case.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#110
post #94

Bit of a humbling/jarring moment when I realized that people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do. I mean, it's quite obvious I suppose. But up until now I just assumed it was only a (massive) catalyst for things people would already be able to do with enough time. But nope -- it seems people are right now employed in roles that they would not be able to fulfil the tasks within if AI w…

I mentioned this then other day, my university class had maybe 80% of people who could not code. No joke. And a lot have gone onto to code professionally. AI is a godsend to this cohort of code monkies. Edit: we graduated in 2006.

You can learn to code in a few months in your free time and get good in your job. That's different from refusing to learn it, because you outsource it.

Also coding is not that hard. You kinda only write the algorithms down you make up in your head. And you do have an algorithmic understanding when you graduate. You also invented some/several languages in during your studies. The learning an actual developed language IS learning, but it's just boring learning, nothing compared to what you did for your exams.

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