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We automated everything except knowing what's going on
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#32Honestly, the post itself reads very generated, very rage bate. I have so much more faith in us and our hobby/industry than this blog post. There are reports of industries trying to use these tools to generate as much as possible, sure. There are also people generating bad art and unpleasant prose and using llms to generate nonsense they don’t pay attention to. I don’t see why that implies that you or I lost interest…
I don't think the hobbyist interest will go away, but I can see what's happening affecting business that use software.
For most businesses, software is just a means to an end, they don't really care how high quality and thoughtful the systems they use are (e.g. look at any piece of "enterprise" software)
What LLMs have done is made much much easier for orgs to launch new features and services both internally and externally, without necessarily understanding the complexity.
For me, that's what this post tapped into. Many orgs already have more complexity than they can reasonably handle. Massively accelerating development, is not going to make that problem better :)
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am mainly seeing across a lot of my engineer friends and mentor who I respect deeply. They are using swarms of agents to build crms, small business and run their homelabs.
Where are these small businesses and startups? The software economy should be booming, right? I’m not seeing it.
There's a massive difference between launching a piece of software and launching a successful business.
Over the last couple of months I've seen a load of new "product launches" in my niche but when you look at them they're largely vibecoded and don't show deep understanding and sustainability, so it's pretty likely you'll never see them as successful businesses.
Looking at some of the related places like /r/sideproject/ there's a lot of releases and I'd be willing to suggest that most of them are using LLMs
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#34"The future belongs to whoever understands what they just shipped." Perfect summary. It's like we invented a world where you can finally, _finally_ speedrun an enormous legacy codebase and all patted ourselves on the back like that was a good thing.
Yup. AI can't automate long-term responsibility and ownership of a product. It can produce output quicker but somebody still has to be responsible to the customer using said product. The hard limit is still the willingness of the human producing the code to back what's been output.
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#35This person has never worked with several decades old government, bank or tax (return) code where all that's ever done is edge cases and implementations of new laws and capabilities being forever bolted on to each other. Systems that were half migrated from a PL/I / Cobol mess to java 7 by Accenture, until the money ran out with the result being that both systems now exist forever and have to be integrated into each…
I agree with all of this, but that's assuming we've reached a plateau. Maybe Claude 6.3 will be able to churn through 10M lines of Java and Cobol, tidy it and convert it to Rust. Or maybe not, but so far the scaling laws are holding.
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#36Should the goal really be to build a system that we completely understand, or build a system that solves a problem? Like we dont fully understand quantum physics, yet good enough to build helpful systems on top of it. Or like not knowing exactly what every bee in a hive does at any moment, yet still reliably harvesting honey in the end? I think people have this modernist desire for absolute truths and certainty, where the world we live in clearly is postmodern. There are no certainties, only probabilities. So embrace the chaos, try to build systems that help to contain entropy for some useful purposes, and accept that all of them will eventually fail in some way and you will need to course correct. Faulkner is dead, long live Pynchon
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im not a writer. Just a guy with an opinion
I like the thought behind the piece, but what I think the criticisms are reacting to is the profusion of short, bursty sentences (just like the ones in the parent post), which can be great when used sparingly, but start to feel repetitive and have a "LinkedIn"-ish vibe, at least to me. For example the very end: Most of you won't be able to answer that. And you already know it. That's the conversation this industry ne…
I have been doing most of my writing over there...honestly I hate it. So thank you for the feedback.
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#38Whoa a CEO writing about why their product is especially important in this very moment!
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#39eventually i realised it was cheaper just to vibecode and buy put options over my company by managing the risk of failure and technical debt with a financial instrument, i have a lot more freedom to move fast and break things, and scale aggressively
Would this not be considered insider trading? Serious question
it is if you have specific event driven knowledge that the put options would gain from
but if you just buy deep out of the money put options every year, say 50% price drop, in a 10b5-1 structure, its ok. you will get sued a bit more than usual
not much different than buying life insurance, except if your company crashes like monday.com , some schmuck who sold you the puts will have to pay you a tonne of cash then you can do a dilutionary rights issue or just use the cash buy a boat in miami and start something else
Re: We automated everything except knowing what's going on
#40You cannot understand everything. That has been the case since long before AI. I have a vague idea how the linux kernel works, and I could figure it out (I once found and fixed a bug in FreeBSD device drivers) - but I don't, I just trust it works. I've never looked at sqlite to understand how it works - I know enough SQL to be dangerous and trust it works. I know very in depth how the logging framework of my project works - maintaining that code is part of my day job and so I need to know, but the hundreds of other developers in the company that use it trust it works. Meanwhile my co-workers are writing code that I don't understand, I trust they do it well until proven otherwise.
AI is very useful, but it so far doesn't write the type of code I can trust. Thus I use it but I carefully review everything it does.