Live data from Hacker News

A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

asim.bearblog.dev

451–460 of 526 posts

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could they have deleted it because of all the negativity? They did make a silly mistake, but we are humans, and humans, be it individually or collectively, do make silly mistakes.

If you code for a hobby/fun, yeah, sure, it's a silly mistake. If you're earning past six figures, are part of a team of programmers, call yourself an professional / engineer, and have technical management above you like a VP of Engineering, yadda yadda....then it's closer to systematic failure of the company's engineering practices than "mistake." There is a reason we call it software engineering , not software fuck…

Calling yourself an engineer doesn’t make you one.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I felt when a Gitlab employee deleted the production database by doing it in the wrong terminal window.

Why do employees have write access to production DB?

Lazy attitude towards proper role management and poor engineering practices. More common in small companies or small teams managing their own service (db and app)

Really all you need is logging and potentially temporary read access to the db if you need some info that you can't derive from the logs.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#453

Two more problems identified solely from the screenshot: * you have two competing subscription id columns. * a uuid is not a string, it is a 128 bit integer. If your database limits to 64 bit integers then use a 64 bit integer for the id instead of a string, or use an array of 128 bytes.

> you have two competing subscription id columns.

That's kind of rational, id is their own internal id. subscription_id is the id on stripe. A better name would be stripe_id.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#454
post #226

Did anyone else assume that this was about the Bear app, because there is no branding or link back to the author's actual project? Also, did anyone click on the double ^ at the bottom, hoping to either go back up to the top or find something about the author's company, only to find that they had upvoted the post by mistake? I'm wondering if (by this count) 167 other people might have done that.

Yes, thank you, I had the exact same experience. The actual project is probably https://reworkd.ai/

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you code for a hobby/fun, yeah, sure, it's a silly mistake. If you're earning past six figures, are part of a team of programmers, call yourself an professional / engineer, and have technical management above you like a VP of Engineering, yadda yadda....then it's closer to systematic failure of the company's engineering practices than "mistake." There is a reason we call it software engineering , not software fuck…

This is how I felt when a Gitlab employee deleted the production database by doing it in the wrong terminal window.

Post mortem for the outage I referred to.

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-datab...

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#456
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should've been picked up at unit, way before monitoring.

The error didn't show up until multiple entities were created. I can forgive someone for not having unit tests for scaling issues.

Creating more than one entry is not a “scaling issue”.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#457
post #448
post #445

They had 8 AWS tasks running 5 instances each with code written in TypeScript and Python, with frameworks like next.js, with $40 revenue and only a few weeks dev time? What the actual fuck hahahaha This is made worse when they edit saying the reason the codes crap is because of time constraints, but spent their time refactoring across languages and spinning up a distributed system FOR NO REASON. That is self imposed…

Because they have half a million dollar to star with and 1.2 million dollars on top and then free AWS credits to burn.

If I give them a trampoline they shouldn't spend all day jumping on it, just because they can. Especially if they're busy with features.

They literally had 1 instance of the backend per $1 of revenue, and the reason the bug wasn't seen straight away was because they had 40 backend instances each with a single uuid that could be used for users before it broke with non-unique id errors.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There has to be an option to pass a static default value Does there, though? You can always set `Column(default = lambda: 1234)`

Yes, because you're creating a table and the value needs to be encoded as string in the CRATE TABLE query. You could in theory pass a lambda which is disassembled in SQLalchemy, then checked against the pattern returning a constant, then the constant itself gets used... But I'm not sure SQLalchemy would go that way. It's not as crazy as Linq. To be explicit: You're not seeing a function called later in python. You're…

No[0], default= is inserted into the DML queries by the client. A DDL DEFAULT clause is only generated if you set server_default= instead.

[0]: https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/core/defaults.html

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#459

> Our project was originally full stack NextJS but we wanted to first migrate everything to Python/FastAPI This is the eye opener for me, how is a startup justifying a re-write when they don't even have customers?

> This is the eye opener for me, how is a startup justifying a re-write when they don't even have customers? In my case (with a real project I'm working on now), it'd be due to realizing that C# is a great language and has a good runtime and web frameworks, but at the same time drags down development velocity and has some pain points which just keep mounting, such as needing to create bunches of different DTO objects…

You don't need to make DTOs when you don't have to, using AutoMapper is considered a bad practice and is heavily discouraged (if you do have to use a tool like that, there are alternatives like Mapperly which are zero-cost to use and will give you built-time information on what doesn't map without having to run the application).

Hell, most simple applications could do with just a single layer - schema registration in EF Core is mapping, or at most two, one for DB and one for response contracts.

Just do it the simplest way you can. I understand that culture in some companies might be a problem, and it's been historically an issue plaguing .NET, spilling over, originally, from Java enterprise world. But I promise you there are teams which do not do this kind of nonsense.

Things really have improved since .NET Framework days, EF Core productivity wise, while similar in its strong areas, is pretty much an entirely new solution everywhere else.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#460
post #192

i'm not a big openAI fan and even I think the title is crummy. I think it should be "How we used chatGPT to make a 10k mistake." -- at least then it's honest about the party at fault, that being the startup that didn't vet generative code. Relatedly i've been throwing AIs at the problem of ordering mods and dependencies for game engines; it's pretty astonishing the error rates you see involving medium-sized text list…

This has also largely been my experience trying to have some openAI and local models help with game modding/scripting. Requires constant hand-holding which is just as much work as just doing it myself.
Post reply on HN