Aviation is a good example if you want to have zero fatal mistakes. There is a way and there is a cost to do so.
The same way erlang is good example of how to run a highly available system with hot reload and observability and stuff. There is cost for that too.
Maybe not all of the projects need the same properties. I'm fine if some of the stuff is having scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. Some kind of government portal that I use once a year had my permission to be offline between 0300 and 0500 and then again after 1200.
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.
The amount of trust AI has set on fire is incredible.
Business and people that I once though competent I trust no longer.
I'm watching leaders I thought had vision throw the future away for the shortest-term gains.
What have we become?
It's been one of the most eye-opening things for me as well. People who I considered serious and intelligent completely falling prey to "no need to read the code" AI psychosis.
Perhaps it reveals something deeper about about differing personality traits, about people who like programming as a discipline and like understanding code, vs people who view at as a means to an end.
> 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.
I think the parent take is valid if you disqualify people managers/leaders rather than ICs. I think that's also valid to disqualify those takes because they aren't in the trenches every day. They may have points strategically for what's best for the company, but not what's best for the workforce or the industry.
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.
[flagged]
You're promoting your own company here, which as far as I can tell from the vibecoded website is Yet Another Agentic Platform of some sort. And prominently features a leaderboard with high scores for some reason.
It hardly meets the bar of a mission critical product like an ERP or payment processor layer where introducing random billing errors in customer data could be fatal to a B2B company's viability.
Ok. Keep moving the goal posts.
I guess we are not serious engineers making a serious product for serious business. I'll make sure to let our customers know.
If you scroll up to the message you originally replied to, OP's goal posts from the start were companies like Stripe (which was specifically named).
Most businesses aren't in that category, that doesn't mean they aren't able to provide useful services and make money. But your company does not seem like it meets that bar.
Expanding the group to "any money making SaaS" would be moving the goalposts for the point OP was clearly making from the beginning.
Sorry for being a bit dismissive in my previous comment but it was fairly jarring clicking your link expecting a more responsive counter example to their argument, and then left a further bad taste after realizing from your bio that it was self-promotion.
And just to pile on, payments is an incredibly competitive space, and operational excellence is non negotiable for someone like Stripe, as they are a higher priced provider.
Your site does not give me “serious” vibes. Swamp club? More like slop club.
His top customer is skunk-ape.
Oh my that is convincing. Yes, I've seen lots of this sort of thing. I believe you, a Twitter influencer is behind it. AI building AI systems for AI to build AI systems with.
Thanks!
Unable to understand sarcasm, AI truly allows a certain type of mouth breather to shine.
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.
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?
The test code is written and checked by AI without humans needing to be the ones looking at it.
soooo wouldn't that be exactly the "deskilling" being discussed here, and isn't that deskilling concerning for money-handling firms?
having seen both (a) mission-critical human-built systems become nightmares for maintainability and extensibility and (b) bleeding-edge ai coding agents confidently and quickly fix a wrong problem in the face of an issue (or fix it in a slightly wrong way), I remain skeptical that this great de-skilling will all be perfectly fine.
of course, if you aren't looking at the code you won't fucking know until someone yells...
I disagree with several premises of the article. There is not going to be human led investigations of outages. People do not need to train on easy outages to be able to handle hard outages. Even if you wanted to train people on easy outages AI makes it easier than ever to setup up real world like issues to replace the need for real world experience. I also disagree in labeling it deskilling when it is a reallocation of skills to what is actually needed.
>concerning for money-handling firms
The real world is robust. It's okay for money handling code to have bugs. It's not the end of the world and AI will be able to have a lower bug rate than humans.
> The real world is robust. It's okay for money handling code to have bugs.
This is true. The world will go on. But your business will lose more money than it gained by not paying attention to the code. It will lose money because it will have to compensate customers or lose customers. That's how the world maintains it's robustness.
Your business competes against other businesses. If hand written code is superior, that business will win.
I've seen some terrible AI-written tests. You have to check that code too. You have to check all the code.
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.
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.
For practical purposes an agent is learning if you put information in its context. So you can create a comprehensive architectural analysis and put it into context and suddenly the agent is familiar with the project. You can also delete information from context, which is a rather hard and imprecise process with humans.
> it cannot learn, and it cannot understand things for you
the former is demonstrably untrue (and wildly so), and the latter is just an egocentric/anthropocentric "the genie in a bottle only answered my wishes, it didn't tell me what to wish for". buried in that statement is the presupposition that humans being able to understand that something is actually Important; short of religious/faith-based reasons I don't see the justification for the primacy of human understanding when it comes to the determination of Truth. if anything, being "understandable" to humans strikes me as an anti-goal. are we really to believe that human comprehension is the limiting factor keeping society from degrading into "decoherence"? how well is that going for us? the reason humanity places such a premium on identifying "The Truth" is precisely because of how illusory it is for our fallible minds. LLMs struggle with many things, but coherence is least among them. that is why "slop" works so well-- if it wasn't at least mildly coherent, it would be easy to discriminate.
> there are A LOT of lazy executives, and lazy developers who are spewing a lot of slop all over the place and there are even more lazy humans who are happy to ascribe this to a shortcoming of the technology and not of humanity itself.
insofar as we are descending further into post-truth, it isn't because of AI slop blurring the lines between fiction and reality; it is because we are all collectively realizing that Truth isn't all it's cracked up to be. LLMs are forcing us to take a long hard look into the mirror and we don't necessarily like what we see.
Please point me to the paper about the coding model that can continuously learn.
uhhhh well i don't think you would have any trouble finding that if you looked at all. my point is that these models continuously learn by virtue of being continuously trained on new snapshots of the world. the idea that they don't learn from experience at all is self-evidently silly.
I can choose a weak LLM to disprove your entire comment. Next time come up with something that can't be debunked in two seconds.
yeah, because clearly the point i was making was that all shitty, pedantic LLMs fit into this category. that would really pwn me!
I mean, have you looked at Microsoft products since their inception? They still print money. Or Atlassian.
Software quality was never as big of an issue as it’s made out to be.
Even before AI most software that ran “mission-critical” systems was kind of bad. I mean huge enterprises got routinely hacked bc of some owasp top 10 shit. And this happened many many times across all industries.
It’s not like before AI everyone was writing well-tested and reviewed secure super brain code
Not losing production data and not getting breached is also something we try to make zero mistakes at.
Those of us who care. Those optimizing for economic returns or out of ideology are not. More carnage will be required for incentives to swing back I think.
"Security is for losers"
> Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Proton CEO Andy Yen: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295112 - October 2026
Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692 - October 2026
Good luck.
Edit: There appears to be some consequences for acting like this and those actions being made public.
Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307183 - October 2026
That's the sort of thing you really don't want to hear from your encrypted mail company.
Vote with your feet or prepare for your eventual breach notification and data loss event. You control who you choose to do business with, and who custodians and processes your data, it is a choice. Make good choices.
The problem is, ultimately, most companies have this mindset. Certainly the ones you've heard of do.
Charlie Munger once said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." There are very, very, very few actual incentives to operate a real infosec effort at most companies. Think about it: how many companies have you heard of going out-of-business because of breaches? If you're like most Americans, you've probably received at least one letter from some company you did business with telling you that their systems were compromised and your data may or may not have been stolen as a result. They'll usually close out the letter with an offer of free credit monitoring for some finite length of time. Since that's useless and a lawsuit is a pain in the ass with no guarantee of benefit, the vast majority of people simply sigh and toss the letter in the trash.
There's no real way to pin identity theft or other consequences on a given data breach, so it's hard to make any sort of claim that way.
At the end of the day, the company has saved money by not instituting best InfoSec practices and red-teaming their software on a routine basis. There are no civil or criminal penalties for them not doing so.
So they don't.
Which is why the recent movements for cybersecurity liabilities are so relevant, they are the incentives.
Now in some countries those with data security office role have more to worry about than only losing their job, if they sign off on something that isn't qualified to be out there in first place.
https://germancomplianceinstitute.com/blogs/news/personal-li...
I can imagine people are quickly looking for an alternative now. I wouldn't want to hear this from any company I'm a customer of.
FWIW, Fastmail is awesome.
I've been doing a bit of research, and mailbox.org looks like a winner. It's in Europe and it supports IMAP. Those are pretty much my main requirements, I think.
Do they have a free tier?
Moving faster is good. But only if it means sending more agents (and humans, that part is important) to do the same amount of testing in less time. Dropping critical work is not that.
> Moving faster is good.
Says who? For what purpose? To whose benefit?
I want my encrypted email company to move slow, deliberately, and very carefully.
I'd like most software in general to move slower. Some, I'd like to not move at all. I hate churn for churn's sake, or piling useless features just so you pretend you did something to justify your subscription pricing, both of which were already the norm before AI and are worse now.
To speak in Apple terms, we don't miss more and faster crap novelties. We miss the Snow Leopard releases.
> Moving faster is good.
No, not necessarily. Sometimes, yes. For anything important, the last thing I want is a company that's moving too fast.
An email company? The base protocol RFC was written in the 70s. It's as mature as computer technology gets. There is zero value in moving fast here, all the value is in building an absolutely rock solid and secure solution.
The very opposite of move fast and break things.
Oblig. Simpsons:
Homer: “There’s three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!
Lisa: "Isn’t that also the wrong way?"
Homer: "Yeah, but... faster.”
Why is moving faster good? I don’t see much benefit to it, unless I am a shareholder.
Even if you're a shareholder, the long term gains of an investment are much higher than the short term ones.
The trouble is that executives are bonused on much shorter time scales, and they run the company.
> That's the sort of thing you really don't want to hear from your encrypted mail company.
Tone deaf award of the decade surely goes to that guy.
If it were some social game app or something, I guess it wouldn't be as tragic, but for a company whose sole reason to exist is to provide security... wow. Goodbye any trust ever again.
"His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”"
Mmmmm... I think I may have to score this particular point for the CEO. Lovingly handcrafted code has been many things over the past 30 years, but "secure" is not one of the adjectives I'd apply to it. Anyone who thinks that the lovingly handcrafted code has always just been wonderfully secure needs to check the tint on their glasses.
A proper AI setup probably can produce more secure code more quickly than conventional development processes... however one of the keys will be to understand that yes, that will still be slower than writing code that is not rather carefully analyzed for security and a company like Proton had better have a strong commitment to never, ever skipping that step because it's slowing them down or it got expensive. "Proper" in "proper AI setup" is the most important word.
But that's not to say that I'm endorsing everything else he said. Even if it is true that companies will be able to stop hiring engineers, which at the moment I seriously doubt [1], a company like Proton should expect to be one of the last companies who can do that, not be getting publicly excited about it first. Hey we dumped all our engineers because our managers can just prompt our AIs just as well here in October 2026 would definitely be a "instantly cancel any Proton services I had" signal for me.
[1]: One of the things I don't expect to change is that there are plenty of people I would describe my actual day-to-day work to and they would consider it a living hell if they had to do it. I still quite enjoy it overall. And there are plenty of jobs that other people love and I would consider a living hell. Even in 25 years that's going to be the case. There will be people willing to put up with the process of working with the system to create this stuff... but the people who are willing to be professional about this, do the QA, do the work beyond the first fun prompts, is going to be a minority, and an even smaller minority who take the time to get good at it. There will always be people who are better and people who are worse.
While I agree that handcrafting code has never been any kind of guarantee of secure code, I'd argue that it remains a condition: if all you have is a set of specs (or even worse, specs written by AI and not read carefully by anyone) and no mean to ensure that the implementation actually matches the spec, you essentially have no understanding of what the code is doing, which is security suicide.
Of course, AI reviewers and security tools will catch some security errors, but this should come as an addition to a proper security design, not instead of it.
God am I happy to not have switched to Proton right now!
Haha same! Was about to pull the trigger in the next few weeks
I kick myself for having adopted part of its paid offerings.
Wow this makes me hesitate to renew with them
I am wondering if these managers and CEOs even understand what their company's product is and that this lack of understanding is what causes them to become obsessed with things only a manager does. Which is ironic in the face of the accusations that developers are against AI because they just want to keep their jobs. It's the managers who want to live out their management fantasy.
Just learned about his position on security today. Been a Protonmail user for a while now. Initially I switched to detach myself from the US corp monopolies. Its just a matter of time now before I shutdown my Protonmail account. CEOs should understand that company ethics and security are not just black pixels on a white background.
Wow. I'm literally reconsidering having any mails at proton anymore. This is beyond abysmal attitude.
The irony here with Yen (and to be clear, fuck him) is that Proton has been _slow as molasses_ since the beginning. It took them literal years to launch a calendar. A calendar!
Either he's been like this the entire time, trying to crack the whip and failing, and thus a bad leader who has repeatedly failed to get results, or he's (as his employees have said) very deep in AI Psychosis and completely abandoned his principles.
It doesn't matter which it is, they're both extremely damning for the company and his leadership.
>The irony here with Yen (and to be clear, fuck him) is that Proton has been _slow as molasses_ since the beginning. It took them literal years to launch a calendar. A calendar!
As if that's a problem? I want them to be my fucking encrypted email. Not a calendar. Not a backup. Not a VPN. And they've already stretched to all kinds of shit.
They are that. Is something fundamental missing from Protonmail?
My point is they announced they’d ship a calendar in 2019 and it took 2 years to ship a full release and 3 to ship an iOS app.
It also sort of sucks, and in 2024 (year 5) they announced they’re rebuilding it. The rebuild partially shipped in 2026.
For a guy suddenly obsessed with speed these timelines are even more absurd.
I would rather have protonmail without all the stuff they are adding there
What is it with weirdo tech executives and calling people losers? First DHH, now this guy.
Weak man's idea of a strong man. Strong leaders protect and support those who work for them, and accept legitimate criticism and being challenged on their ideas, but I digress.
"Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king." The measure is not who you can bully and denigrate successfully, but who will follow you to hell.
Related:
Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50327650 - November 2026
>Strong leaders protect and support those who work for them, and accept legitimate criticism and being challenged on their ideas
And whose idea of a strong man is this? I don't think many people would follow Putin to hell willingly, or that he accepts any criticism, or accept being challenged on his ideas. But he could be called a "strong man", at least the kind of "strong man" some people aspire to be.
According to my friendly neighborhood AI there is no commonly accepted term for this effect, but when you have a community of people that is heavily selected for a particular characteristic you will end up with people that generally are outliers in some other significant ways too. In this case, caring deeply about email security is weird... unfortunately... and you can expect further weirdness from such people.
You can also read about people talking about this in the super-early computer user communities. When you had to be a bit crazy to even be interested in computers you ended up with people who were outliers in a lot of other ways too. As more people came in to the space it would regress to the mean... this is one of the things that "regression to the mean" can be regressing from.
It's not weirdness, it's just the combination of being an asshole and nobody in his life being able to tell him 'No.'
> According to my friendly neighborhood AI there is no commonly accepted term for this effect, but when you have a community of people
Social contagion [0] (not to be confused for memetics [1]) involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network. [...] Throughout history all social contagions have had a single thing in common: the people who follow them genuinely believe their group is only doing positive effects, and cannot rationalize negative effects from within their group.
Tech executives are a group (and a network), its not some "regression to the mean" its common human social behaviour within group dynamics. It's not just those two there has been a progressive slide of executives joining the 'tech-bro' subgroup.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Anybody who is as responsible for popularizing Ruby on Rails & YAML as DHH has, has no standing to call anyone else a loser.
I mean if a company doesn't care about protecting its users' data then any conversation about improving security is gonna be inapplicable to them.
I'd also suggest that companies being so blasé is a direct result of lacking regulation. If there was no laws about aviation safety I bet we'd have more airlines with lax safety standards and more accidents.
This is something I noticed as well.
Because humans were, loosely speaking, careful about not making egregious security mistakes, most security vulnerabilities turned out to be either harmless or the result of a programming language allowing the type of exploit to begin with.
But now we have code from non-people ordered by people who both don't care about security at all.
That means you will get maximally bad security outcomes which in turn will make governments consider regulating the software development industry. They are speed running their own demise.
Eww. I have now lost all interest in their products.
> "Security is for losers"
Lol, brave words in an age of $6B heists and major CVEs every week.
There’s a limit to how much society can spend on aircraft safety, but it’s quite a lot because it’s so important. Cyber Security teams have to work with large constraints because spending an ever increasing amount of money directly, or losing money indirectly (like not allowing product teams to move quickly) is explicitly not a goal of most companies. So while we try to make zero mistakes, most companies are willing to take a non zero amount of extra risk of these things happening in exchange for other benefits.
Aviation is working with the same constraints. Development of new systems is very slow, that's true. But day-to-day operation is extremely fast paced, and still impressively safe. They are able to change an engine of an aircraft within hours, with a very high probability of not making any relevant mistakes in the process.
Sure, but at what cost? How quickly improvements are delivered is one thing, but the materials and chosen process also come at a premium. And while it probably is worth it in aviation due to life and health being highly irreplaceable, the value of for instance my chat history or photos is certainly finite and quite low. Should they be corrupted, leaked, or worst case gone, it would somewhat suck. But at the same time I've effectively concluded that safeguards are worth about 0.4% of my monthly take home after tax, and when the yearly bill comes due I'm each time increasingly questioning whether I actually do value them even that highly.
"Sure, but at what cost?"
At the appropriate and necessary cost.
A less costly new engine design or less costly engine swap procedure that fails is worse than no airplane at all. If it's cheaper and fails, we don't want it. It wasn't cheaper, it was even worse than expensive.
It's not hyperbolic all or nothing. Sure infinite cost is just as useless as infinite failure, but there is no reason to talk about infinite.
At what cost? Some. At some cost.
> At what cost? Some. At some cost.
This doesn't address how the cost of safety related procedures versus the cost of risks mitigated is calculated (which is way harder than saying "some") so that the buyer can actually know what "some" cost is.
It's also not addressing the parent comment's point: the bad outcomes in aviation tend to be very impactful (both in human safety and financially), so the tolerance for mistakes is way lower.
Compared to cybersecurity for a brochureware website, where it takes a far larger stretch to go from "security incident" to "someone's dead". (Also, people in cybersecurity aren't going to accept "it has some cost, and you might buy it if it's not too expensive".)
For the commercial flight industry this is very easy to calculate: zero deaths are acceptable. This is not like car manufacturer recall calculations (famously, referenced in Fight Club: if the lawsuit costs the manufacturer less than the recall, they don't recall). The airline industry is built different thanks to heavy regulation.
You could ask: is it _worth_ making it that safe? But we don't ask that. We just make it that safe.
I think there is a good point to be made that this level of safety (it costs what it costs) is probably not worth it for cybersecurity, in general, even if it's largely considered worth it for commercial aviation.
Zero acceptable deaths is equivalent to zero acceptable breaches -- the only solution is to offline the system entirely. You simply can not get rid of all risk or even know if you've gotten rid of all risk.
https://assets.performance.gov/APG/files/2023/june/FY2023_Ju... states on page 5 that they're aiming to cut fatalities in half from 8.9 per 100M passengers in FY 2009 to 4.4 fatalities per 100M passengers in FY 2025. (It looks like they were doing way better than that goal.) "As low as reasonably practical" (ALARP) seems to be the term for aviation, which is very clearly not a zero fatalities goal.
> You could ask: is it _worth_ making it that safe? But we don't ask that. We just make it that safe.
They... Don't? Aviation accidents continue to happen and they will continue to happen. They've decided that a positive number of fatalities is worth it not because they want anyone to die, but because they know that perfection is impossible. You can't achieve it, and you can't know that you've achieved it.
As software intermediates more and more of the physical world, we're gonna end up at least as regulated as finance, and potentially as much as aviation.
The only real question is how much damage will be caused before that happens.
I think it's highly doubtful we're going to see software generally regulated as finance, which like aviation can facilitate damage to individuals on a scale they'll never be able to recover from by themselves (in terms of lifetime needed to (re)acquire the resources). Most of the world is quite insignificant and unimpactful, and already regulated as tightly as it is based on that. Software being a larger part of the services provided or goods transacted is not suddenly going to inspire tighter regulation of the quality of services and goods offered beyond what they already are, like for instance some minimums around certain things not catching fire and killing people, or some services being rendered in a mostly food safe way. If humanity desired to go beyond lazy minimums we'd see universal effective elimination of planned obsolescence, not just best cases of minimum warranty periods measured in a handful of years, and then being fine with products mysteriously failing within days of the sellers support obligations ending.
> I think it's highly doubtful we're going to see software generally regulated as finance,
Probably not all of software, but basically all of our financial infrastructure, operational infrastructure and communications infrastructure is either already critically dependent on software, or heading that way.
I think that the EU's DORA act is probably the way things will head. We'll regulate the outcomes and ensure that these services can be maintained.
Honestly, the only reason that this hasn't already happened is that the US government is wildly against basically all regulation of software. I figure that if we end up in some kind of cybersecurity crash (likely, given the current trajectory) that we'll get lots and lots of regulation.
And to be honest, this will be for the better in the long term, but it'll probably suck for all of us in the short term (but at least there'll be jobs).
We also need some way for a regular person to recognize cheap vs quality software on sight the way they can for a frying pan.
It's fine for cheap pans to exist because any user of one can see what it is and make an informed choice to use the junk one or the good one.
You can also reduce blast radius from breaches, and make systems more robust, rather than just trying to make zero mistakes. How bad breaches are and how well you can recover is also part of the outcome, just framing it as zero breaches or nothing is not that helpful, even though reducing breaches is important.
This isn't a different thing - it is just one of techniques used, and it still requires humans to understand the systems they are building. Teams that outsource their systems understanding to AI will fail, no matter how they frame it.
Isn't that the same thing as "not making mistakes"? If you can reduce the blast radius and didn't, wasn't that a major mistake in the first place?
A lot of code is certainly not written careful enough. Plenty examples of plaintext passwords storage in the wild.
No, it's recognizing mistakes will be made and no one is perfect. You will also make mistakes regarding blast radius - sometimes the blast doors don't close or function like you thought they would during an actual explosion.
Defense in depth is the idea. Swiss cheese model of failure.
Yeah, but this is bottlenecked by both your ability to observe and understand the system, which is precisely the thing that's being reduced by careless use of AI tools.
But why stop there? Aim higher!! End of all world’s wars, no more hunger anywhere anymore, free abundant clean electric power for everyone everywhere!
Jokes aside, you can’t get anywhere near zero fault unless to impose strict operating regulations , requirements and procedures and regular checks… just like in aviation.
And even there, boeing manages to fuck it up somehow.
Maybe it's different in your neck of the woods, but all the government portals I use tend to have access to rather sensitive PII, and I would really prefer their ops teams be up to snuff as a result.
A better metaphor would perhaps be machining. You will not find a shop that has no CNC anywhere, but the machinists who can also use manual machines will always have an edge for certain things. Not that they're working manually much in their day to day, and not as all as a failsafe, but you can just tell who has that kind of background.
(And you can also tell whose mind is stuck in the old world, too.)
It's first-principles thinking. You have to have some sense of how you would do it in order to reasonably engage with a machine's idea of how to do it. Otherwise you're just nodding along, like yeah sure bro uhhhh lgtm.
Aviation is an example of how there's no way to have zero mistakes, or even zero fatal mistakes.
People always find new ways to make mistakes. The approach in aviation is to investigate, identify root causes, and do what is possible to prevent the same mistake happening again.
There is no guarantee we'll ever reach perfection.
It's more about managing mistakes. Pilots and other people in aviation still make a lot of mistakes all the time. But aviation figured out how to deal with that fact. Design procedures in a way, that mistakes self-correct most of the time. Add sanity checks exactly where they matter, and many other strategies.
The lesson from Aviation is how to constantly have mistakes without failure.
Sometimes they close down airports, that’s risk management not complete risk avoidance.
No coincidence it is the textbook example of a complex system.
https://how.complexsystems.fail/
> I'm fine if some of the stuff is having scheduled or unscheduled maintenance.
You might be, and your customers may not! And your competitor could be more than happy to offer a more reliable service.
Then we all get shit service based on interrupted operation without due maintenance and more stress.
I’m using Elixir for every (web) project now specifically because the cost is negligible. I can't think of a reason to use anything else and the agents are _really_ good at writing it, particularly given the excellent structural guardrails that are in place.
Being able to ensure all of the test run freakishly fast async is a huge win too.
I don't get elixir, maybe I'm not ruby brained enough. Too much syntax sugar for me
Elixir is great from a syntax perspective. It gets compared to ruby a lot for some reason but they're nothing alike. Elixir syntax is very deliberate about everything.
The BEAM runtime is the real win. Your options are Erlang, Elixir and Gleam to get the BEAM.
Out of the 3, I prefer Elixir and Jose is a brilliant leader for it.
How often do you need the HA features BEAM can give you in a webapp though?
It’s not the HA features that are the selling point for me.
The combination of lightweight processes with their own HEAP and the preemptive scheduler means that millions of processes can run on the same machine with consistent execution time, no GC pause, and no worry that a single resource heavy process is going to slow down everything else.
The balance tradeoffs allows you to do a lot of things that would otherwise be poor architectural choices.
LiveView is just one example, where you’re able to completely forgo the need for a frontend framework but get all of the same benefits with lightning fast execution times.
There’s a lot of wins that come from it.
From a AI standpoint, functional code is simpler to trace and maintain because the AI doesn’t have to worry about side effects.
The HA perks are a bonus.
The OP didn't present an absolute. They said "Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from" and I 100% agree with them.
> Maybe not all of the projects need the same properties.
Definitely not all projects need the same level of quality.
But per the thread, if you allow the skills of all the engineers in your company to rot, what happens when there is a system that needs the higher level of quality?