There was an article some days ago where someone was claiming "with AI only you decide how many bugs you have" — well no the same forces apply because tokens are not free and business wants to do stuff that directly earns money.
Well we have to make cases and measure where the bug costs money and how. Lots of bugs are irrelevant and not blocking people from using the software. If bug doesn't drop database but is "dropdown doesn't exactly align" or "given precodnitions A,B and C something bad will happen" while A, B and C have very small possibility of occuring.
> It is not "will" it always is money.
So it isn't money. You can argue that it is power, that the money is the proxy, but this still wouldn't answer the question.
The reason I'm pushing back hard here is these simplistic answers are just thought terminating cliches. They dismiss the problem, calling it inevitable and unsolvable. It only helps to preserve the status quo. It only helps empower those who seek to take our own. So I call bullshit
Now we've got an ability to push code out faster than ever, and absolutely zero innovation for QA. You simply cannot trust AI to verify your code is working. You can't have Quality Assurance without some form of assurance. So you're either hiring twice as many QA guys for the 10x output, or you're mostly ignoring the idea.
Economics has bubbles. Does computer science? Anyways, screw this. I'm moving to nursing.
With that said there are numerous companies that are very concerned about the situation. They know AI is finding bugs in their software at an accelerated rate, one they are having difficult times keeping up with because they want human understanding and review of the fixes to avoid introducing new bugs.
To me, this is the craziest part about all of it. Why doesn't anyone seem to care?
This is the same as when junkies specifically seek batches of drugs on which others overdosed.
I'm hoping one of the unintended side effect of it being essentially free to find and exploit (and fix) software bugs is that companies become less cavalier about shipping bugs in their software. Unlike most of the industry I don't believe "bugs are inevitable." Bugs are a choice developers make when they're rushing and careless and when all of their incentives are to ship quickly. You can ship bug-free software but it takes (or used to take) a really long time and a lot of care, care that commercial software developers just don't ever seem to muster.
Maybe when their software is getting 0wned over and over and 30 security issues are published a day, they'll start caring and taking their time.
We've all seen developers who game the system. They hide the bugs just enough so checked out management doesn't see them. They convince themselves that those bugs don't matter, even when they trip over them later. They get rewarded because they appear to move fast, eventually become management, and the whole thing gets worse as time goes on.
It's a structural problem. Yes, the level of influence is higher the higher up in the org chart you go, but there is still "power" at every level. Even the most junior developer has power. The worst thing we can do is become apathetic, shrugging it off, saying "well what can we do?" That attitude is one of many factors that got us to this point. Importantly, it is a factor we actually can influence.
That's why I object to it. Not because I think it is going to solve the problem overnight, but because it is a thing we have some power over. And it is a very different situation when one engineer in a team is vocalizing "our software has issues" while most of the team silently agrees vs several members of the team simply vocalizing agreement. There's no magic single variable fix to problems like these, but we got here because a bunch of little problems added up. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the way to solve it is through solving a bunch of little problems. Each seems insignificant in isolation, but they accumulate
Today, while bitterly staring at Claude per my current employer's "use genAI or else" mandate, I got "bloviating."
Very low signal information, preemptively trying to cover every rebuttal despite nobody ever planning on making one, in the few times someone does he plays devils advocate endlessly
Like bro just let us babysit these agents, everything’s going to happen
The worst one was where I fixed a datetime bug and although it had been sending out false alerts, I was asked to dry run the 5 lines of code I changed, like a coding interview. In all this pressure I forgot what the code was meant to do, and was dismissed and asked to set up another meeting with an explanation of all the various cases that could happen...
Alternatively, what about just doing the right thing? Either you convince them to take this stuff seriously or you find alternate employment. How can you subject yourself to the moral degradation and conflict of principles? I could understand for someone with no other financial options, or in some sort of oppressive culture/economy. But most in our field probably don’t fall into those
> But, isn’t it our job to impress upon the managers the importance, in a certain regard?
Our job is to engineer. Our job is to build (good) products. Information can't just flow top down, it has to go the other way too.
What seems weird to me is that during "the good times" in our field, that happened more frequently. A strong employee market (as opposed to an /employeer/ market) seemed to be good for employee, employeer, and the people buying everything. But myopia is quick to set in.
> Alternatively, what about just doing the right thing?
If you haven't heard it before, allow me to introduce you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[0]. I think one of the important things it states is that the second group is actually bad for business. I think there's a common misconception. People are often saying "well it is good for business", pointing to all kinds of messed up shit. I don't buy that. It is myopically good for business, but not in any meaningful length of time. Though then again, as Buffet says "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Michael Burry famous learned this first hand.
[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
- First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
- Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. > Michael Burry managed just fine
Penny wise, pound foolish
The best is the explanations are in the PRs. They even have Claude these days to answer their questions... I swear, these people are more addicted to spending money than they are about making money.
FFS, we're living in a world where Linux has more than doubled in popularity mainly due to Microsoft actively fleecing their customers. It's crazy
/I use arch btw (and have been on it for over a decade)
> tech managers look at tech debt as a thing to be maintained at a certain level
> allowing us to achieve perfection
Look, I'll defend high quality code all day long. Good code allows you to move fast just like taking 30s to tie your shoe laces allows you to run faster.
But we can't write high quality if we pretend that perfection exists. Globally optional solutions are the exception, not the norm. There's almost always tradeoffs we need to make. The high quality code, the high quality engineering, is understating, tracking, triaging, and minimizing those tradeoffs. It is writing code that allows you to change those decisions as quick and effectively as possible. But perfection doesn't exist. It's a good thing to chase, like Utopia, but ultimately unobtainable. A good engineer knows how to triage.
Advocating for perfect code will be a losing battle. But we should not, even for a second, let that be interpreted as meaning quality doesn't matter. I'm still frustrated with people who say "don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough" as most of the people that say that believe "good enough" is "it looks like it is working" and call a "demo" a MVP
Huh?