61–70 of 73 posts
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>You cannot understand everything. I 100% agree with this in a individual person sense, but in a humanity sense someone does understand linux very deeply and is very intentional on how they change it which to me is how I gain trust in it. does trust change when the entire SLDC is AI?
SDLC ? software development life cycle ?
"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.
We are speedrunning legacy "codebases" all the time. Or do you conjure up your own pickaxe, mine your own minerals, produce your own electricity, and construct your own computers and networks first before you go off to develop an application? Would you even know how to do those things? That is all enormous legacy codebase that we speedrun all the time. Just add one more to it.
eventually 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
Maybe you're looking for 'moral hazard'?
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Anything in production is legacy; I'm pretty sure it happens as soon as the code is shipped regardless of who wrote it.
True, but I think there's another dimension implied: how many devs are left that understand the code? Being able to start at zero is a fascinating surprise (compared to five years ago).
Maybe they stick around for a while, maybe they move on to another job, but they were THERE at some point. They have a name. You can ask them questions about what they did. And hey, they still exist in the real world too, so you can get in touch with them even after they leave if you need to.
AI powered development is like a guy shows up, gets hired for 90 seconds, writes part of a feature, and dies instantly once the code hits the screen.
There's a funny angle to all this. There was an article last year where the author asked AI for a web app. It installed a gigabyte of node modules and crashed on startup. He told it to calm down and just use php, it gave him 100 lines with no dependencies that worked the first time. The Pieter Levels stack :) Of course, this is ideal for solo entrepreneur. If you are employed, then you cannot finish it in 100 lines.…
You don't have to go whole-hog and go back to PHP, a reasonable Django application would suffice :) But the point remains: the NPM monoculture is indefensible.
"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.
We are speedrunning legacy "codebases" all the time. Or do you conjure up your own pickaxe, mine your own minerals, produce your own electricity, and construct your own computers and networks first before you go off to develop an application? Would you even know how to do those things? That is all enormous legacy codebase that we speedrun all the time. Just add one more to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question: is there a big inherent difference between "I don't understand this thing but I think this other human does," and "I don't understand this but I think this other AI does"? If your answer is "yes," do you think that's inherent to the (metaphysical?) fact of it being AI or to specific limitations to current AI? If the latter, what changes to AI would let you trust it?
I don't know. AI has an understand of some really complex things, but it also does some really stupid things. Depending on which it did most recently for me I change my answer. The question is does AI understand well enough to maintain that thing for whatever maintenance I need to do in the future?
But it also kind of sounds like you're just saying that there's a scalar of "get a little better" before you'd trust AI with something.
"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.
We have reached a point of complexity and short-termism where it's standard practice to shove a huge, barely tested mass of Python, JavaScript, shell scripts, and who knows what else inside a docker container and call it done. Complete with hundreds or thousands of intractable dependencies, many of which we know ~nothing about and thousands of lines of esoteric configurations for servers we have barely any hope of even getting to run optimally, let alone securely.
Most software has been awful for a while.
Already, with AI:
- We can build everything in a statically typed, analysable, and memory safe language like Rust[0], even bits that really have to interact with the shell or wider OS and would previously have been shell scripts
- We can insist on positively deranged amounts of testing, at every level
- We can easily cut the number of dependencies in our code by >50%, in many cases more like 90%
- We can do the refactor as soon as it becomes obvious that it would be a good idea
- We can implement quality of life admin and monitoring features that would otherwise sit on the backlog for eternity
- We can educate ourselves about what we've built[1] by asking questions about our codebase, build tools to understand the behaviour of our systems, etc.
So yes, I agree that "The Future Belongs to Whoever Understands What They Shipped", but unlike the author I am somewhat optimistic[2]. There is more opportunity than ever to build and understand extremely high quality software that does not accept technical debt, corner cutting to meet deadlines, or poor quality (in design or implementation), for those that engineers who are knowledgeable enough and willing to embrace the new tools.
And AI, and the tooling around it, is only getting better.
[0] or Go or even TypeScript, but there's precious little reason not to pick Rust for most use cases now
[1] of course we need to choose to, and many won't…
[2] of course, there'll also be near-infinite valueless slop and some people will get sucked into that, but this seems little different to regurgitated SEO spam, short form video, and all the non-AI enshittification we already put up with, and perhaps AI will help more of us do a better job of avoiding it
No. Software is being centralized. If the snake oil AI companies are selling about the coming agentic age were true, then the end result is not "anyone can produce software" it is "anyone stupid enough to rent the ability to run their business from an AI vendor can produce software".