In the narrow case of your profession perhaps. Beyond the slipshod world of most software is a universe of standards, licenses and liability.

The lawyers and judges who trusted an ML system to be up to snuff are currently pounding sand.

I worked for one of the largest device manufacturers for a certain kind of sensor.

The requirements/standards for this sensor was made by this company 20 years ago. All the tests and requirements were made by this same company in a way that would minimize the costs for us to keep making new revision we could sell, and make it the hardest for any competitor to enter the market. Another competitor started with a better product abroad, so we copied it, but it didn't pass the tests, so then they installed an owner of the certification house that was a cousin of one of the VPs. No problems passing tests after that.

You think this is all controlled and nice and standardized but it's all just a market from software to hardware.

While quite believable, there is a diversity of industries and standard adherence / enforcement no?

Markets also range from under regulated to over regulated, and are usually in a transition from one end to another (while contending with other forces).

If you don't understand the code, how can you know if it's good enough?

I guess you could ask the model. "Yes well done, you're a visionary software engineer".

Who cares if it's good enough? Send the product, if people use it, it's good enough. If not, let users debut it and give "feedback", problem solved. You then advocate to these users, make them feel important, make them your cash cows, rinse and repeat.

Every team I have been on have been more successful when they gave up on the product ideals and just ensured that the customers were hooked and satisfied.

> Who cares if it's good enough? Send the product, if people use it, it's good enough. If not, let users debut it and give "feedback", problem solved.

I care, because doing a sloppy job and seeing if people will tolerate it is not acceptable engineering practice. It's not engineering at all. More pragmatically, if you do the thing you are suggesting, you won't have users for much longer. They will abandon you and go to someone who actually makes good products.

I don't believe this in practice. I am at a FAANG-like firm, and we are just maxxing the engagement and people use the product more and more the more we serve stuff to keep them hooked using their data and behaviour.

The quality of what we provide seems to matter 0, we are up about 40% issues in prod year-to-year but the users and their engagement is also growing.

I think there is a small subset of technical nerd/idealists who think that quality is all that matters but they are in their own little sandbox while 97% of users are in another one.

> I think there is a small subset of technical nerd/idealists who think that quality is all that matters

This is just a derogatory comment.

It is exactly this kind of arrogance is killing open source. In my area, GIS, there are foundational projects that are necessarily intricate. For example it might be necessary to make a four-dimensonal transform of a location, that takes into account point movement due to the Glacial Isostatic Adjustment. There are hundreds of other complex examples I could come up with.

This is deep knowledge. The libraries are intricate and quality does matter.

Unfortunately the lynchpin maintainer has just gone on indefinite strike, partly because open-source vibe-coders are wholesale copying and relicensing some of these libraries in their quest to ... do what?

I actually I don't know what they want. Take all the oxygen from the room as far as I can tell.

> I am at a FAANG-like firm

Also known as not-FAANG

> The quality of what we provide seems to matter 0

Good for you! There are lots of low skill development jobs before AI where low knowledge coders cranked out WordPress sites for marketing, advertising, and small businesses. Sounds like you got in on the ground floor!

Meanwhile companies like Amazon, one of the As in actual FAANG, do have demands on their software quality. To the extent they essentially said "knock off the tokenmaxxing productivity theater" in a recent, publicized internal memo.

Horses for courses. Sometimes you need an thoroughbred and sometimes a pack mule.

And there's nothing wrong with being a pack mule! And nobody expects a pack mule to understand the work of a thoroughbred!

You are attacking the person rather than the idea.

> The quality of what we provide seems to matter 0, we are up about 40% issues in prod year-to-year but the users and their engagement is also growing.

Sorry for going into a tangent here, but I'm actually unsure if I hate the structures and economic incentives that makes this possible, or if I hate you specifically for defending something so rotten

Next time I rage at some broken UI in some damn service I'm forced to use because that's where people are, I'll remember this comment

[delayed]

More than one service has lost me as a customer due to this process. I don't want a company to use me to verify their slop.

That mindset is why most software was already slop before AI. Users know when your team has turned into salespeople. And now that AI could enable you to do better in the same timeframe the response with this mindset is of course to care even less.

I've been experimenting with vibe-coding some games. One of the games started performing very badly in a particular menu, and I began suspecting it's because of a shader that may be redundantly computed way too much on too many large surfaces. I began writing my suspicion to Claude, then stopped and decided to just describe the problem and see if it would come to the same conclusion as me. A few minutes later, it had profiled the game, found what contributed most to the poor performance, fixed the rendering and made the game performant again. I didn't have to inspect the code to do any of that. The current models (paired with coding harnesses) love to test and validate their results by running the games, taking screenshots, singling out individual parts, including logs to reproduce errors or other issues, and they love to create tests. The code is good enough in the same sense that the code I used to write was good enough if it did what we wanted. My non-technical bosses didn't have to inspect my code for that.

It sounds like you understood what was happening here and used a tool effectively, nice.

That's very different from what a lot of vibe-coders do, like wholesale cloning and relicensing projects. This is happening in the GIS space, and these vibe-clone projects slightly hilariously inherit all the technical debt they didn't understand.

Nothing wrong with using LLMs, but I agree with Andrej Karpathy: "you can outsource your thinking, but not your understanding".

I think that quote is very apt. I experimented with making realistic video game grass (inspired by Ghost of Tsushima), and let it take the reins. But its solution became very contrived and hard to steer in the direction I wanted without me learning the specifics of how grass rendering should work. Still, it seems that I can limit my understanding to the higher levels of abstractions in most cases now. For example, I made it clump grass together according to a voronoi diagram, yet I have no idea how the voronoi algorithm works.

In my experience, it's usually good for finding out the bugs, but I take the fixes it provides with a grain of salt. There were numerous times where the fix could have lead to some more serious bugs because of some business logic special case scenarios that it didn't understand.

Yeah, I'm seeing this at work too. It's capable of adjusting behavior to meet some narrow success criteria, but it can easily introduce bigger problems in the process in large coupled code bases, which it doesn't catch on its own. Automated tests help a bit, but I find I still have to steer it very strongly at work.

Writing is hard, but what I was trying to say is that it's okay to just send it as long as you're doing it consciously and intentionally (and I do that frequently enough); but if it's not an explicit choice that can be problematic.

I see, that makes sense, I think that applies to most things from eating food to watching media, etc.

However it takes more mental energy and people don't like that

Why would Prime be in that list. He had an entire arc where he tried to make it work and then went back to the drawing board.

I am not saying he writes all code by hand, of course. Just that he is furthest in figuring out some sort of mid point between full comprehension and cognitive surrender.

I have missed the more recent content, so perhaps I have missed something, but this was my read last I watched.

I'm also not sure why anyone would attach importance to his opinions as a software engineer, he's exceptional in generating entertaining content but as an engineer he does not seem above average. Definitely not even close to the category of Jonathan Blow or Andrej Karparthy