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.
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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