HN user
If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.
In this case, with Microsoft's really amazing revenue stream, a charismatic management team can distort reality for quite some time and convince the right people within the company that there is no fire.
logging into MS Teams
I mean, this is one application nobody should ever log into!
I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.
Sadly review isn't enough. I just today I found some code that I reviewed 2 months where the developer clearly used an agent to generate the code and I completely missed some really dumb garbage the agent put in. The agent took a simple function that returns an object with some data and turned it into a mess that required multiple mocks in the tests (also generated by the agent).
The dev is a junior and a clear example of what is to come, inexperienced people thinking coding is getting an agent to get something to pass CI.
The tech debt is accelerating exponentially!
Those people on the boeing flights would have appreciated a little more of the correct motivations.
Instead they got McDonnell Douglas'd
As it turns out the motivations matter way more than you might think.
Another key difference is that wood itself has built in visual transparency as to the goodness of the solution - as it is pretty easy to figure out that a cabinet is horrible (I do get that there are defects in wood joining techniques that can surface after some time due to moisture, etc - but still, lot of transparency out of the box). Software has no such transparency built in.
The advantage of hand coded solutions is that the author of the code has some sense of what the code really does and so is a proxy for transparency, vibe coded solutions not so much.
I mean, it is 2025 and still customers are the best detectors of bad software over all quality apparatus to date.
You want to pay me bank to rubber stamp bad code? Weird flex but alright!
3. ...
4. ...
5. Profit!
If your competition figures out a way to cut overhead by 10% and you don't, they win. This is the normal outcome between similar businesses
The only thing that will save RTO companies now is graft and corruption.
I'd love to. First you need to get Tim Cook to stop sabotaging mobile web.
I wonder how better DOM support would help a rust web application frontend framework like Leptos (https://leptos.dev)? Maybe a smaller WASM payload?
(Shown above: my earnings from this bug.)
I lol'd!
As in all things, it depends. For example if you have an iron clad exit plan after you land that promotion for "delivering" a steaming pile for someone else to debug, and you have no sense of shame, then by all means!
swap every postgres insert query, with the corresponding mysql insert query.
If the data and relationships in those insert queries matter, at some unknown future date you may find yourself cursing your choice to use an LLM for this task. On the other hand you might not ever find out and just experience a faint sense of unease as to why your customers have quietly dropped your product.
yeah, adding "AI" to something like that really means add in random nonsensical failures
Yep, Tim Cook = Steve Ballmer
It is almost like Apple has an operations guy at the helm who doesn't understand software at all!
This is why I still haven't pulled the trigger on home automation stuff. Bad enough keeping my laptop functioning, don't want that experience extending to the rest of my life!
+1 OMG I was going die using that Gemini garbage! Was so glad they had a way to switch back!
One feature I love on my android phone is how reliably it sets timers based on a voice command:
"Ok google, set a timer for 8 minutes" has kept me from burning my food on the stove for at least a year now!
“Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives
If you are a software leader, work on discovering and filling customer needs. Filling those will boost both your success and the company's success.
Executives at most companies rarely do anything other than figure out how to get a bigger paycheck. They have no clue about, nor do they try to discover, customer needs; but they have and aggressively acquire a strong sense of their upchain's needs.
This means a software leader who does basic research on customer needs is the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind at most companies.
I mean how many hours does one need to work to make the search results even worse by adding more adverts?
What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?
I work on a massive monorepo that the LSP chokes on regularly.
In the end, global search is my sweetest friend
Yep once we kick the PMP out, then we can work on safety so people will openly share where they are in the battle with the real enemy - the software.
As it turns out 10x isn't enough. Once the complexity of the solution hits a certain point you really need multiple brains working together to reliably evolve it in a sustainable manner that isn't rife with operational disruption.
Almost all problems with daily scrum/kanban/whatever can be traced back to inappropriate management.
Most of the time the issue is the daily whatever has been turned into a demotivating status meeting where a PMO trained project manager (PMP) is drilling each person for a status roll-up.
When management is inappropriate, the ignorance is so thick that no rational discussion can penetrate.
Yep and here we are in 2024 and just this last week I got into a heated discussion with an 'Technical' Program Manager raging about how the deliverables are slipping by three days mostly because he and his up chain are heavily invested in a schedule that is built on hope. Not only are the estimates bad, but the resourcing from the different silos has not happened either, so there is tons of unfinished work just on the work that is known, let alone the unknown unknowns!
Next up he's about to find out his integration timeline is complete and utter bullshit.
One of the challenges working as a software developer is that friends and family tend to view 'tech' as an amorphous blob.
Forget friends and family, most Project/Product Managers think the same way, and they are often way harder to say no to.
Oh gawd yes they do!
There really is a market niche for "just make some stuff" that LLMs are great for.
If the client wants "something" and an LLM provides a significant percentage of "something" that looks good enough for the developer to get paid, that is definitely value for the developer. Might not be valuable for the client, but I'd claim the state of the industry before LLMs was generating plenty of software that wasn't actually valuable for the client anyway.
Oh there will be political theatre on par with the WWF, no doubt. For those people it falls under the heading "Nice work if you can get it."
In my almost 30 years in the industry I've run into plenty of people who claimed they knew what code did by reading it, but in practice every single one of them turned out to be only another human flummoxed by unexpected runtime behavior.
Maybe you're the exception!