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When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

leodemoura.github.io

11–20 of 309 posts

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#11
I think the issue goes even deeper than verification. Verification is technically possible. You could, in theory, build a C compiler or a browser and use existing tests to confirm it works.

The harder problem is discovery: how do you build something entirely new, something that has no existing test suite to validate against?

Verification works because someone has already defined what "correct" looks like. There is possible a spec, or a reference implementation, or a set of expected behaviours. The system just has to match them.

But truly novel creation does not have ground truth to compare against and no predefined finish line. You are not just solving a problem. You are figuring out what the problem even is.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#12
post #4

No one does currently, and its going to take a few very painful and high profile failures of vital systems for this industry to RELEARN its lesson about the price of speed. In fact it will probably need to happen a few times PER org for the dust to settle. It will take several years.

Sure but industry cares about value (= benefit - price), not just price. Price could be astronomical, but that doesn’t matter if benefit is larger.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#13
post #6

You do. Even the latest models still frequently write really weird code. The problem is some developers now just submit code for review that they didn't bother to read. You can tell. Code review is more important than ever imho.

I agree with you. But I have to say, it is an uphill battle and all the incentives are against you.

1. AI is meant to make us go faster, reviews are slow, the AI is smart, let it go.

2. There are plenty of AI maximizers who only think we should be writing design docs and letting the AI go to town on it.

Maybe, this might be a great time to start a company. Maximize the benefits of AI while you can without someone who has never written a line of code telling you that your job is going to disappear in 12 months.

All the incentives are against someone who wants to use AI in a reasonable way, right now.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#14
At the end of the day you need humans who understand the business critical (or safety critical) systems that underpin the enterprise.

Someone needs to be held accountable when things go wrong. Someone needs to be able to explain to the CEO why this or that is impossible.

If you want to have AI generate all the code for your business critical software, fine, but you better make sure you understand it well. Sometimes the fastest path to deep understanding is just coding things out yourself - so be it.

This is why the truly critical software doesn’t get developed much faster when AI tools are introduced. The bottleneck isn’t how fast the code can be created, it’s how fast humans can construct their understanding before they put their careers on the line by deploying it.

Ofc… this doesn’t apply to prototypes, hackathons, POCs, etc. for those “low stakes” projects, vibe code away, if you wish.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#15
I'm in the process of building v2.0 of my app using opus 4.6 and largely agree with this.

It's pretty awesome but still does a lot of basic idiotic stuff. I was implementing a feature that required a global keyboard shortcut and asked opus to define it, taking into account not to clash with common shortcuts. He built a field where only one modifier key was required. After mentioning that this was not safe since users could just define CTRL+C for the shortcut and we need more safeguards and require at least two modifier keys I got the usual "you're absolutely right" and proceeded to require two modifier keys. But then it also created a huge list of common shortcuts into a blacklist like copy, cut, paste, print, select all, etc.. basically a bunch of single modifier key shortcuts. Once I mentioned that since we're already forcing two modifier keys that's useless it said I'm right again and fixed it.

The counter point of this idiocy is that it's very good overall at a lot of what is (in my mind) much more complicated stuff. It's a .NET app and stuff like creating models, viewmodels, usercontrols, setting up the entire hosting DI with pretty much all best practices for .net it does it pretty awesomely.

tl;dr is that training wheels are still mandatory imho

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#17
post #4

No one does currently, and its going to take a few very painful and high profile failures of vital systems for this industry to RELEARN its lesson about the price of speed. In fact it will probably need to happen a few times PER org for the dust to settle. It will take several years.

I feel like people used to talk about nines of uptime more. As in more than one. These days we've lost that: https://bsky.app/profile/jkachmar.com/post/3mg4u3e6nak2p

I recall a time, maybe around 2013-2017, when people were talking about 4 or 5 nines. But sometime around then the goalposts shifted, and instead of trying to make things as reliable as possible, it started becoming more about seeing how unreliable they can get before anyone notices or cares. It turns out people will suffer through a lot if there's some marginal benefit--remember what personal computers were like in the 1990s before memory protection? Vibe coding is just another chapter in that user hostile epic. Convenient reliability, like this author describes, (if it can be achieved) might actually make things better? But my money isn't on that.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#18
post #6

You do. Even the latest models still frequently write really weird code. The problem is some developers now just submit code for review that they didn't bother to read. You can tell. Code review is more important than ever imho.

I agree with you. But I have to say, it is an uphill battle and all the incentives are against you. 1. AI is meant to make us go faster, reviews are slow, the AI is smart, let it go. 2. There are plenty of AI maximizers who only think we should be writing design docs and letting the AI go to town on it. Maybe, this might be a great time to start a company. Maximize the benefits of AI while you can without someone who…

I actually agree with good time to start a company. Lot of available software engineers that can actually understand code, AI at a level that can actually speed up development, and so many startups focusing on AI wrapper slop that you can actually make a useful product and separate yourself from the herd.

Or you can be a grifter and make some AI wrapper yourself and cash out with some VC investment. So good time for a new company either way.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#20
post #6

You do. Even the latest models still frequently write really weird code. The problem is some developers now just submit code for review that they didn't bother to read. You can tell. Code review is more important than ever imho.

> The problem is some developers now just submit code for review that they didn't bother to read.

Can you blame them? All the AI companies are saying “this does a better job than you ever could”, every discussion topic on AI includes at least one (totally organic, I’m sure) comment along the lines of “I’ve been developing software for over twenty years and these tools are going to replace me in six months. I’m learning how to be a plumber before I’m permanently unemployed.” So when Claude spits out something that seems to work with a short smoke test, how can you blame developers for thinking “damn the hype is real. LGTM”?

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