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- Hacker News
- I'm just waiting for my current company to have a Sev 1 CritSit so I can document the bejesus out of the root cause and expose our non-technical AI evangelist leadership as the sort of goons most of the senior development staff already suspect.
Only by walking us into some revenue or customer impacting failure - through inappropriately having junior devs doing senior level things - will some sense of sanity start to prevail again.
- Oh man, if only. The top brass driving this screaming frenzied MORE AI crusade will never face the firing line no matter what happens. It will either be a) "mistakes were made" and nobody is really at fault because we're all trying to change the world or fellate the future or whatever the line is, or b) James, Sam, Jesse, and the rest of Team B (none of whom are truly top brass) are getting fired out of a cannon into the sun as a warning to the rest of the plebs.
- "Just use autoresearch and it will fix your app's memory leaks in an hour" is what I was nonchalantly told by someone who has never written a line of code ever.
I guess what I relate to the most is how dismissive people get about real software engineering work.
I may have skill issues, but I am yet to reach the level of autonomous engineering people tend to expect out of AI these days.
by vadepaysa - Bug reports also go down when people lose faith that they will be fixed, because reporting them is often a substantial time commitment. You see it happen pretty regularly as trust in a group/company collapses.by Groxx
- I agree, and I'd like to point out that this problem isn't unique to AI driven projects. I think much, if not all, of what Mitchell has been observing can readily happen without AI in the mix.
- oh i’ve definitely seen “we’re going to track the number of bugs created in jira per team” turn into “people just file things as tasks instead of bugs” or “only easy things are filed as bugs and completed right away”. It’s trivially gameable.by zemo
- Just let AI report the bugs. Problem solved!by autoexec
- Add this the real possibility that significant part of reports that get filed might be AI generated or rewritten. With high possibility of being misreported because of that. Or have incorrect parts... So attack on multiple sides.
And we do not get even get into potential adversarial tactics. If you have no morals what is better than using agents to flood your competitor with fake bug reports.
by Ekaros - The last three times I filed detailed bug reports as a client, all I got back were AI replies asking the same questions I’d already answered in the original report and suggesting alternatives I’d explicitly said I’d already tried. No wonder people don’t write bug reports anymore.by jampa
- If you feel this way, you might like my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (those tokens) (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main).
Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287
by dtnewman - Cynic!by dnnddidiej
- This is delicious.
- Hard to have sober talk about this since a lot of discourse is AI psychosis vs. AI naysayers. Does software quality seem to have taken a jump in the past few years to anyone? Not to me, seems to be getting worse. Think that's a decent signal. Can tell you I'm dealing with a non-technical VP who loves blast submitting vibe-coded PRs and while there's some quick wins, overall quality is bad, and we had our first real production outage that Claude one-shot caused but could not one-shot solve.by thr0w
- There's an acceleration of current known processes that is being referred to as agent speed (vs human speed). But this is purely a mechanical effect. There don't seem to be augmentive cognitive effects. "AI has invented this revolutionary algorithm/workflow/architecture" is an article title you'd expect to see pop up quick, and often.by ByThyGrace
- My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.by miek
- Spoiler: it's notby Falimonda
- That has probably been an advantage since the move of everything into the web.by marcosdumay
- do you mean this aesthetically or quantitatively? Are they actually outcompeting / making more money ? Or do you mean they are now looking more desirable because their competitors are racing to the bottom (though likely making money on the way down)by tonymet
- yes, I was never so happy to work in Germany. People used to joke about the proverbial fax machine still being a thing but I've never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn't exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice's Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don't know a single person here who is forced to work like this.by Barrin92
- Literally the plot of Battlestar Galactica! Life imitates art indeed...by DCKP
- I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery.
Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. It will become a special kind of process to clean room out such a mess and rebuild it fresh (probably still with AI) after distilling out core design principles to avoid catastrophic breakdown.
Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first, place but it will take us 20 years to learn them, just like original software eng took a lot longer than expected to reach a stable set of design principles (and people still argue about them!).
by zmmmmm - "Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity"
You have not seen the spreadsheets that accounts run the firm on.
Bloody kids!
by gerdesj - > Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first...
It's really nowhere near as complicated as making distributed systems reliable. It's really quite simple: read a fucking book.
Well, actually read a lot of books. And write a lot of software. And read a lot of software. And do your goddamn job, engineer. Be honest about what you know, what you know you don't know, and what you urgently need to find out next.
There is no magic. Hard work is hard. If you don't like it get the fuck out of this profession and find a different one to ruin.
We all need to get a hell of a lot more hostile and unwelcoming towards these lazy assholes.
by jcgrillo - > I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting
I thought the same when I saw development outsourced to Indians that struggled to write a for loop.
I was wrong.
It turns out that customers will keep doubling down on mistakes until they’re out of funds, and then they’ll hire the cheapest consultants they can find to fix the mess with whatever spare change they can find under the couch cushions.
Source: being called in with a one week time budget to fix a mess built up over years and millions of dollars.
by jiggawatts - I've already done a handful of these gigs for early vibecoded products that had collapsed in on themselves. The scope of work was to stabilize the product and only make existing features work.
The issues have all been structural, not local. It's easier to treat it like a rewrite using the original as a super detailed product spec. Working on the existing codebase works, but you have to aggressively modularize everything anyway to untangle it rather than attack it from the top down.
All of these projects have gone well, but I haven't run into a case where a feature they thought was implemented isn't possible. That will happen eventually.
It's honestly good, quick work as a contractor. But I do hope they invest in building expertise from that point rather than treating it like a stable base to continue vibecoding on.
by badtuple - > Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand
I think it will be needless verbose complexity.
I kind of imagine someone having an unlimited budget of free amazon stuff shipped to their house.
In theory, they are living a prosperous life of plenty.
In reality, they will be drowning in something that isn't prosperity.
by m463 - Reminds me of the quote in the original Westworld movie:
“ These are highly complicated pieces of equipment… almost as complicated as living organisms.
In some cases, they’ve been designed by other computers.
We don’t know exactly how they work.”
Now how did that work out ;-)
by blipvert - Heh. Got a customer recently around this. Entire infrastructure and CI/CD vibecoded. They half implemented Kubernetes in Github Actions that were several thousand lines long and impossible to understand.
I think the problem will get worst. I dislike the marketing around AI, but I do think it is a useful tool to help those who have experience move faster. If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.
by abhiyerra - A non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.by ramoz
- I'm going through a mixed experience regarding this, personally.
Management is really pushing AI. It's obnoxious, and their idea on how it fits into my team's job specifically is completely, hilariously detached from reality. On the off chance someone says something reasonable, unless it fits the mold, it's immediately discarded. The mold being "spec driven development". We're not even a product team for crying out loud. I straight up started skipping these meetings for the sake of my sanity. It's mindwash, and it's genuinely dizzying. The other reason I stopped attending is because it ironically makes me more disinterested in AI, which I consider to be against my personal interests on the long run overall.
On the flipside, I love using Claude (in moderation). It keeps pulling off several very nice things, some of which Mitchell touched on in this post (the last one):
- I write scripts and automation from time to time; Claude fleshes them out way better with way more safety features, feature flags, and logging than I'd otherwise have capacity to spend time on
- Claude catches missed refactors and preexisting defects, and does a generally solid pass checking for defects as a whole
- Claude routinely helps with doing things I'd basically never be able to justify spending time on. Yesterday, I one-shotted an entire utility application with a GUI to boot, and it worked first try; I was beyond impressed.
- Claude helped me and a colleague do some partisan cross-team investigation in secret. We're migrating <thing> and we were evaluating <differences>. There was a lot of them. Management was in a limbo, unsure what to do, flip-flopping between bad options. In a desperate moment, I figured, hey, we kinda have a thing now for investigating an inhuman amount of stuff in detail - so I've put together a care package for my colleague with all our code, a bunch of context, a capture of all the input data for the past one week, and all the logs generated. Colleague put his team's side of the story next to it, and with the help of Claude, did some extremely nice cross-functional investigation. Over the course of a few weeks, he was able to confirm like a dozen showstopper bugs, many of which would have been absolutely fiendish if not impossible to fix (or even catch) if we went live without knowing about them. One even culminated in a whole-ass solution re-architecturing. We essentially tore down a silo wall with Claude's help in doing this.
So ultimately, it really is a mixed bag, with some really deep lowpoints and some really nice higlights. I also just generally find it weird that a technical tool [category] is being pushed down people's throats with a technical reasoning, but by management. One would think this goes bottom up, or is at least a lot more exploratory. The frenzy is real.
by perching_aix