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My development team costs $41.73 a month

philipotoole.com

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Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#31

Post by uncircle »

bee_rider wrote: post #18
dmitrygr wrote: post #2

I think we need a mandatory disclosure on software "was >1% vibecoded" same as we have on allergens for food. This'll prevent its use in any safety-critical place.

This shouldn’t really matter, software can also be written by very bad coders. If you care about safety, you care about the whole process—coding, sure, but also: code review, testing, what the design specs were, and what the failure-path is for when a bug (inevitably) makes it through. Big companies produce lots of safety critical code, and it is inevitable that some incompetent people will sneak into the gaps, there…

> This shouldn’t really matter, software can also be written by very bad coders.

The issue is that there is a non-zero likelihood that a vibe coder pushes code he doesn’t even understand how it actually works. At least a bad coder had to have written the thing themselves in the first place.

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#32

Post by Nevermark »

mjr00 wrote: post #25
otoolep wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post author here. Few things. You are right that when someone (a human) submits a PR it didn't cost me anything (short of my time to review it). But those folks are not a team, not someone I could rely on or direct. Open-source projects -- successful ones -- often turn into a company, and then hire a dev team. We all know this. I have no plans to commercialize rqlite, and I certainly couldn't afford a team of human d…

> So, in a sense, I now do have a team. In another, more accurate sense: no, you have a tool, not a team. A very useful tool, but a tool nonetheless. If you believe you have a team, try taking a two week vacation and see how much work your team does while you're gone.

There is a new continuum. "Team" is just a convenient word to emphasize that "Tools" are moving significantly in the "Teams" direction.

The post emphasizes the degree this is true/not.

Different people are going to emphasize changing attributes of new situations using different pre-existing words/concepts. That's sensible use of language.

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#34

Post by otoolep »

Nevermark wrote: post #32
mjr00 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, in a sense, I now do have a team. In another, more accurate sense: no, you have a tool, not a team. A very useful tool, but a tool nonetheless. If you believe you have a team, try taking a two week vacation and see how much work your team does while you're gone.

There is a new continuum. "Team" is just a convenient word to emphasize that "Tools" are moving significantly in the "Teams" direction. The post emphasizes the degree this is true/not. Different people are going to emphasize changing attributes of new situations using different pre-existing words/concepts. That's sensible use of language.

>There is a new continuum. "Team" is just a convenient word to emphasize that "Tools" are moving significantly in the "Teams" direction.

Exactly.

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#35

Post by mjr00 »

Nevermark wrote: post #32
mjr00 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, in a sense, I now do have a team. In another, more accurate sense: no, you have a tool, not a team. A very useful tool, but a tool nonetheless. If you believe you have a team, try taking a two week vacation and see how much work your team does while you're gone.

There is a new continuum. "Team" is just a convenient word to emphasize that "Tools" are moving significantly in the "Teams" direction. The post emphasizes the degree this is true/not. Different people are going to emphasize changing attributes of new situations using different pre-existing words/concepts. That's sensible use of language.

No, it's clickbait and that's why this submission got flagged, sorry.

A team is comprised of people. Being able to prompt an LLM to create a pull request based on specifications is very useful, but it's not a team member, the same way that VSCode isn't a team member even though autocomplete is a massive productivity increase, the same way that pypi isn't a team member even though a central third party dependency repository makes development significantly faster than not having one.

If this article were "I get a massive productivity boost from $41.73/month in developer tools" it'd be honest. As it is, it's dishonest clickbait.

As the saying goes, there is no "AI" in "Team".

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#36

Post by tracker1 »

bee_rider wrote: post #18
dmitrygr wrote: post #2

I think we need a mandatory disclosure on software "was >1% vibecoded" same as we have on allergens for food. This'll prevent its use in any safety-critical place.

This shouldn’t really matter, software can also be written by very bad coders. If you care about safety, you care about the whole process—coding, sure, but also: code review, testing, what the design specs were, and what the failure-path is for when a bug (inevitably) makes it through. Big companies produce lots of safety critical code, and it is inevitable that some incompetent people will sneak into the gaps, there…

I think it's even more likely at a lot of big companies, especially when a lot of upper managers feel like a developer is an interchangeable cog and there isn't any variance in terms of value beyond output.

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#37

Post by tracker1 »

kangalioo wrote: post #28
paulddraper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would suggest ">1% in dynamically typed language" disclaimers as well?

If someone made that happen I'd be ecstatic

Github shows the breakdown of languages in a project... you can, for the most part already do this... at least for floss on github.

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#38

Post by Nevermark »

mjr00 wrote: post #35
Nevermark wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a new continuum. "Team" is just a convenient word to emphasize that "Tools" are moving significantly in the "Teams" direction. The post emphasizes the degree this is true/not. Different people are going to emphasize changing attributes of new situations using different pre-existing words/concepts. That's sensible use of language.

No, it's clickbait and that's why this submission got flagged, sorry. A team is comprised of people. Being able to prompt an LLM to create a pull request based on specifications is very useful, but it's not a team member, the same way that VSCode isn't a team member even though autocomplete is a massive productivity increase, the same way that pypi isn't a team member even though a central third party dependency repo…

That is not a clickbait title. It is normal use of language, and the articles contents are not surprising or misleading relative to the title.

Titles don't need to be pedantic.

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#39

Post by bee_rider »

uncircle wrote: post #31
bee_rider wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shouldn’t really matter, software can also be written by very bad coders. If you care about safety, you care about the whole process—coding, sure, but also: code review, testing, what the design specs were, and what the failure-path is for when a bug (inevitably) makes it through. Big companies produce lots of safety critical code, and it is inevitable that some incompetent people will sneak into the gaps, there…

> This shouldn’t really matter, software can also be written by very bad coders. The issue is that there is a non-zero likelihood that a vibe coder pushes code he doesn’t even understand how it actually works. At least a bad coder had to have written the thing themselves in the first place.

For something safety critical, individual programmers shouldn’t be able to push code directly anyway. However, a vibe-coder spamming the process with bad code could cause it to jam up, and prevent forward progress (assuming the project has a well designed safe process).

I guess I did assume, though, that by “in any safety-critical place” they meant a place with a well-defined and rigorous process (surely there’s some safety-critical code out there written by seat-of-the-pants cowboys, but that is just a catastrophe waiting to happen).

Re: My development team costs $41.73 a month

#40

Post by keeda »

ohdeargodno wrote: post #33

Your software is a wrapper around an already existing, widely used, extremely documented project and basically just extends SQLite with what could have been a regular extension. No shit it's easy. So is a CRUD PHP service.

Building a robust, performant distributed database on top of a standalone database is not at all trivial. Sure, you could boil it down to "consensus algorithm + DB" but there are countless edge cases. I am not very familiar with this project, but it seems pretty well-tested: https://philipotoole.com/how-is-rqlite-tested/

And you can look at the code here: https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite

Does seem a wee bit more complicated than a CRUD PHP service.

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