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A comment on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt. Parent comment

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by maccard on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @09:45AM (#50366244)
> We're a clown industry. We only made it this far because, usually, buggy code doesn't kill people and we can iterate and patch things quickly. We never had to do things correctly, we could flourish with abysmal levels of quality acceptance.

What industry do you think is different?

I've had a decent amount of construction work done on my house, and if I had a pound for every shortcut that the guys doing the work took, it would pay for the work they did. And these are the _good_ ones. The bad ones don't even bother following the legal requirements. Somewhat recently [0] it was found that less than half of healthcare workers followed recommendations on _hand washing_.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/infection-control-an...

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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by physicles on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @10:23AM (#50366899)
Residential construction isn’t much better. But the people who build the really tall stuff, the structures that would kill people if they collapse, that’s real engineering. The odd bridge that collapses is usually a political problem (lack of funds for maintenance).
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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by ebiester on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @10:40AM (#50367163)
Have you heard of 432 Park Avenue?
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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by post-it on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @11:15AM (#50367727)
Doesn't look like it's collapsed and killed people.
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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by maccard on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:20PM (#50369468)
Go hang out on a subreddit for electricians, or plumbers, and in any thread where they talk about the professional side of it, you'll see a consensus that all the work is awful, done with no regard for professionalism, and that if there was just more support for doing it properly they would. Just like here.

There are plenty of software projects that are managed to an incredibly high standard professionally - OpenBSD, PostgreSQL, Curl all come to my mind pretty much immediately. Linux is probably the closest thing to "skyscraper" development and has been going for 35 years at this point.

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