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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#431

Post by SequoiaHope »

consumer451 wrote: post #347
foxfired wrote: post #260

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette.…

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequ…

Note that other types of engineering are also often vibes based. The mechanical engineering for a rocket engine is extremely rigorous but the engineering for an injection molded housing for a cheap cell phone is a lot more about following a few heuristics and getting it out the door. Even in robotics where I work, it’s mostly about making parts that pass whatever acceptance tests you come up with. In civil engineering and aerospace failure costs human lives and millions or billions of dollars. In robotics maybe you have some machines fail in the field but in many instances you have one overarching safety system and many of the parts are irrelevant to that. The camera housing for example. So no paper trail or mathematical design validation is required to prove you designed it right. Often those are desirable but if you just manufacture it and test it a lot you’re probably fine.

This was something I noticed in my early career in mechanical engineering and later doing PCB design and software for robotics. It’s easy to find firms that just need adequate parts without the professional certifications or ass-covering calculations of other engineering fields.

All this to say, it’s not just software versus the rest of them. From my position, civil and aerospace seemed more like the exception while much of the rest of the engineering world is more vibes based.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#432

Post by zzrrt »

charlotte-fyi wrote: post #248

I feel in a really weird position where I both really dislike what AI is doing to the experience and practice of writing code, to the point where I want a job doing literally anything else besides using the computer, but also think that these tools are extremely powerful and only getting better. I think Mitchell's point is well taken -- it's possible for these tools to introduce rotten foundations that will only be f…

> But humans have introduced subtle yet catastrophic bugs into code forever

So now the AIs will do more of that, at superhuman speed.

> will we also not learn that we need to shift more to specification and validation

We'll just quickly learn what we've been trying to do for decades, while also treading water in floods of more code than has ever been written before? And some of the motivations to write correct code are being deflated - "just vibecode it again and see if the bugs disappear, it only took a week and $200."

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#433

Post by eddythompson80 »

sebmellen wrote: post #397
bastawhiz wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you optimize for MTBF, you optimize for it to be a long time between failures. You optimize for the system not going down in the first place, but when it does do down it might be Pretty Bad. If you optimize for MTTR, you don't care how often you go down and instead optimize your recovery time to be as short as possible. The concepts are pre-computing.

Not the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?

To give a timely example, think GitHub and what its leadership is thinking/optimizing for. Do you care if you’re down once or twice a week vs how long those down times are? What’s the KPI you’re managing GitHub with?

Current (and by current I mean the last 4-5 years) they only cared about MTTR. That was probably the only metric they measured and cared about. When a system went down it fired an LSI “Live Site Incident” (as opposed to a CRI “Customer Reported Incident”). At the time you grilled your team. Eventually you come to the conclusion that an LSI should only be measured by MTTR. MTBF is meaningless because MTBF limits your “ship new features” velocity.

You might scoff at GitHub and “ship a new feature” concept in the last 5 years, but if you’re an enterprise customer you’d know how much nonesense they shoveled out in the last 5 years. Absolute insanity of “what the fuck” type feature because customer X who is paying $$$ is asking for it type features.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#435

Post by [deleted] »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #431
consumer451 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequ…

Note that other types of engineering are also often vibes based. The mechanical engineering for a rocket engine is extremely rigorous but the engineering for an injection molded housing for a cheap cell phone is a lot more about following a few heuristics and getting it out the door. Even in robotics where I work, it’s mostly about making parts that pass whatever acceptance tests you come up with. In civil engineerin…

[deleted]

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#437

Post by ActorNightly »

wg0 wrote: post #434

> lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure. Can someone please remind and refresh my memory what this whole debate was with what arguments?

Building things not to fail vs what Netflix does, build things to recover from failure.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#438

Post by eddythompson80 »

tonymet wrote: post #412
sebmellen wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?

MTBF = optimizing quality (reliability, uptime, correctness) of AI product MTTR = optimize the ability to correct failures when they occur. He's describing leaders who believe quality no longer matters because any faults or deviations can be corrected so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to waste time on quality.

Yes that’s very correct. The way I think of it, MTTR is easier to measure and manage as a manager. MTTR is all about “operational excellence”. Basically, when shit hits the fan, how good are we at figuring out what caused it and how to fix it. That’s a muscle that you can train, the script goes:

- What alerts are we missing that could have helped us catch that earlier?

- What dashboards could we have had to help diagnose the issue quicker?

- What Ops tools could we have had to help mitigate such issue quicker?

- What extra logging/metrics/telemetry could we add to help us catch this quicker?

- What “safe deployment practices” could we have employed to avoid/improve this?

- what processes could we enforce to facilitate all of that?

Rinse and repeat that few hundreds or thousands of times while mounting MTTR KPI and you will see that number improve. Most likely through your team “gaming it”

MTBF is much, much, tricker to measure or “manage out”. It’s about “excellence in engineering” which is not measurable nor controllable. You want a random feature X. Your team tells you it’s really not how the system works, and they want few months making the change slowly while observing the system. But you don’t want just X, you want X, Y, Z, W, V, Q, A, B, C, D, all the way throw AAZZW12. So you tell the team to go fuck itself.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#439

Post by BrenBarn »

> "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!"

The groundwork for that was laid long ago with the idea of constant updates. It's been fine for years to ship bugs and rely on a rapid release cycle and constant pressure on users to upgrade everything all the time. To roll that back requires a lot more than toning down AI psychosis; it requires going back to a go-slow mindset where you actually don't release things until they're ready. It still needs to be done, but it's harder than just laying off the AI kool-aid.

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