Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by Loquebantur on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:34PM
(#50369668)
Yes, that's where the "engineering" part comes in.
Engineering builds models that approximate the real world under practical considerations. You e.g. have to weigh costs vs risks and apply good judgement.
In essence, you try to achieve the best possible with the resources you've got.
Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by IAmBroom on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:10PM
(#50370144)
You are describing the difference between Verification (Does this do what we explicitly said it would do?) and Validation (Does this do what we wanted to achieve?). One is about compliance of design promises, and the other covers the issue that the various levels of design documents might have failed to completely capture intent.
> The only way to do that is to make your code provable. That again is only realistically doable using AI.
If you're code is "provable" doesn't that only mean you've proved the code meets its specification? The specification can still have bugs.