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▲ jeremyjh 2 hours ago

The problem is that people go on Twitter and see the posts from "thought leaders" and "influencers" who say things like "reading the code is not needed". Those people are not working on systems that have paying customers who would cancel their subscription - or worse - if the software became too defective or unreliable.

You only need a handful of occasions of creating massive billing errors for your customer's customers before they will slag you to all their CTO friends and pull the plug. Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week, and couldn't fix it after two months of thrashing because no one there has any understanding of how anything works anymore. They are simply done at that point, all the value of their brand lost.

▲nickstinemates 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Those people are not working on systems that have paying customers who would cancel their subscription - or worse - if the software became too defective or unreliable.

That's just not true.

▲jeremyjh 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

Name one. Point me to one developer that actually works - themselves, not just in the same company - on a system with serious customers that demand correctness and is spreading that message on Twitter.

▲otterley 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As if engineers, especially those writing software to handle financial transactions (which are usually in regulated businesses), don’t know how to write conformance tests with invariant cases.

▲jeremyjh 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Who are the people who are responsibly writing all this test code but declare loudly on Twitter that no one needs to read the production code?

▲ 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]
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▲keeganpoppen 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't see what the giant social cost of AI hucksters is supposed to be... who cares if some random influencers claim you can vibe code your entire existence? the thing that bothers you is that the grifters are basically right, just for the wrong reasons (and a bit too early). Comments like this imply that there is some cavalcade of situations like this that have caused actual harm to actual people, but it is actually just an emotional response to people who are personally distasteful, and borne out of a desire to make sure that the "assholes aren't proven right". stuff like "Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week" is just so silly... what about AI makes this more likely in any way whatsoever? If anything, AI would have such a subtle scheme for robbing us blind that it would defy characterization into pithy quotation marks. this feels like a complaint about humanity dressed up as a complaint about AI. for all we know, AI could actually improve the situation-- it's not like humanity has set some unimpeachable precedent.

▲jeremyjh 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

AI can absolutely improve the situation. It has helped find and fix bugs I have despaired of ever fixing. But it cannot learn, and it cannot understand things for you. And people outsourcing all their understanding to it absolutely could lead to existential disaster for a system at the heart of the platform. Coding agents write too much code and ignore existing patterns. This has been studied quite seriously and they generally write 2.5x the amount of code a human does when refactoring or enhancing code in a real project. When a very large system slips past a critical point of decoherence you really cannot put any certain boundaries on what kind of problems become possible or how long it may take to fix them.

Yes, there are responsible engineers using AI in innovate ways and making things both more productive and better. But there are A LOT of lazy executives, and lazy developers who are spewing a lot of slop all over the place.