4 ms·

It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to market you

It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to market your company.

Terretta 2y ago
> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let [devs] generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to [whatever]. Except, have you met startup devs? This is by and large the "move fast then unbreak things" approach.
- masijo 2y ago
  This is why working for startups gives me PTSD. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - almost_usual 2y ago
    The idea of inheriting a ChatGPT code base no one understands now makes it worse.
    - hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
      Just give it to GPT-5 for a refactor, easy!
      - pclmulqdq 2y ago
        It terrifies me that I have heard people say this unironically.
        hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
        It’s the natural outcome of SV types denigrating the value of education. Forget knowing anything, just come up with a nice pitch deck and let the LLM write the stack. Not wholly surprised these people are YC backed. I’ve got the impression YC don’t place much weight on technical competence, assuming you can just hire the talent if you know how to sell. Well, now replace “hire some talent” with “get a GPT subscription and YOLO”, and you get the foundation these companies of tomorrow are going to be built on. Which hey, maybe that’s right and they know something I don’t.
- SilasX 2y ago
  For that matter, has OP even met the HN accepted wisdom? "No one knows what they're doing, everyone's faking it, it's fine if you are too" -- so don't take it as a red flag when your fumbling around keeps blowing up, because it surely must work that way everywhere else. My early rant against this mentality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749
  - tmpz22 2y ago
    Its very humbling coming out of startup-land and working with big tech engineers and realizing their tooling runs circles around everybody else and enables them to be much more precise with their work and scale, though it isn't without trade-offs.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      Yeah but a lot of that is just the accrual of improvements that is possible with a lot of resources over a long period of time. People working in "big tech" aren't fundamentally better at building reliable tools and systems; the time and resource constraints are entirely different.
      - crabmusket 2y ago
        And the stakes! This outage might have cost the OP $10k. A similar snafu at a larger company might have cost tens of millions or more.
        fragmede 2y ago
        The big tech tooling probably cost tens of millions of dollars to create, and probably had a couple $10k mistakes on the way to getting it written and running.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- ruszki 2y ago
  It’s possible to move fast the same way, but break less things than this. For example, in this case, they said that they introduced tests to mitigate this. I can assure you that introducing tests takes more time than Google searches to check in like 2 minutes what each lines really does.
- Kesty 2y ago
  The idea of moving fast is to have extensive logs and alerts so you fix all error fasts while they appear without "wasting time" with long expensive tests in a phase where things change every day. 5 days to find out you have "duplicate key" errors in the db is the opposite of fast
mort96 2y ago
Eh I imagine they looked over the code as well, doing code review -- and at first glance, the code looks reasonable. I certainly wasn't able to catch the bug even though I tried to find it (and I was given a tiny collection of lines and the knowledge that there's a bug there!). If anything, I think this says something about how dangerous ChatGPT and similar tools are: reading code is harder than writing code, and when you use ChatGPT, your role stops being that of a programmer and becomes that of a code reviewer. Worse, LLMs are excellent at producing plausible output (I mean that's literally all they do), which means the bugs will look like plausibly correct code as well. I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all.
- throw46365 2y ago
  > I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all. I think using AI tools to write production code is probably indicative of people who don't really know what they are doing. The best way not to have subtle bugs is to think deeply about your code, not subcontract it out -- whether that is to people far away who both cannot afford to think as deeply about your code and aren't as invested in it, or to an AI that is often right and doesn't know the difference between correct and incorrect. It's just a profound abrogation of good development principles to behave this way. And where is the benefit in doing this repeatedly? You're just going to end up with a codebase nobody really owns on a cognitive level. At least when you look at a StackOverflow answer you see the discussion around it from other real people offering critiques! ETA in advance: and yes, I understand all the comparison points about using third party libraries, and all the left-pad stuff (don't get me started on NPM). But the point stands: the best way not to have bugs is to own your code. To my mind, anyone who is using ChatGPT in this way -- to write whole pieces of business logic, not just to get inspiration -- is failing at their one job. If it's to be yours, it has to come from the brain of someone who is yours too. This is an embarrassing and damaging admission and there is no way around it. ETA (2): code review, as a practice, only works when you and the people who wrote the code have a shared understanding of the context and the goal of the code and are roughly equally invested in getting code through review. Because all the niche cases are illuminated by those discussions and avoided in advance. The less time you've spent on this preamble, the less effective the code review will be. It's a matter of trust and culture as much as it's a matter of comparing requirements with finished code.
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. In my experience, hardly anyone in software does know what they're doing, for sufficiently rigorous values of "know what you're doing." We all read about other people's stupid mistakes, and think "haha, I would never have done that, because I know about XYZ!" And then we go off and happily make some equally stupid mistake because we don't know about ABC.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  There’s a difference between not knowing what you are doing and making a mistake.
  - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
    An awful lot of mistakes are made because one didn't know something that would have enabled one to avoid it. Not knowing what you don't know is difficult to work around.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - throw46365 2y ago
    The "zen" of LLMs is that they do not see a real distinction between these two things, or either of these two things and success ;-)
- throw46365 2y ago
  I dunno. I tend to annoy people when taking on jobs by telling people what I am concerned about and do not understand, and then sharing with them the extent to which I have managed to allay my own concerns through research. I turn down a lot of jobs I don't feel confident with; maybe more than I should. An LLM never will.
bogota 2y ago
This is getting more common. I have already had people try to tell me how something works from a chat gpt summary. This would have led to us taking a completely different direction… 5 minutes of reading the actual docs and I found out they were wrong. Now at a new company i have caught several people copy pasting gpt code that is just horrendous. It seems like this is where the industry is headed. The only thing i have found gpt to be good at is solving interview questions although it still uses phantom functions about 50% of the time. The future is bumming me out.
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  It’sa Tower of Babel like effect
- gravescale 2y ago
  Like people who post "here's what ChatGPTx said" instead of their own answer. Quite literally, what is the point? However, I don't think it's really bad for the technical industries long term. It probably does mean that some companies with loose internal quality control and enough shiftless employees pasting enough GPT spew without oversight will go to the wall because their software became unmaintainable and not useful, but this already happens. It's probably not hugely worse than the flood of bootcamp victims who wrote fizzbuzz in Python, get recruited by a credulous, cheap or desperate company and proceed to trash the place if not adequately supervised. If you can't detect bad work being committed, that's mostly on the company, not ChatGPT. Yes, it may make it harder, a bit, but it was oversight you should already have been prepared to have, doubly so if you can't trust employee output. It also probably implies strong QA, which is already a prerequisite of a solid product company. Normal interest rates coming back will cut away companies that waste everyone's time and money by overloading themselves on endlessly compounding technical debt.
  - foota 2y ago
    Is the idea here that normal (read: low?) interest rates will let companies spend more time getting things right?
krick 2y ago
I don't really care about them marketing their company, but, Jesus, seriously, that's how software is going to be written now. TBH, I'm not really sure if it's that much different from how it was, but it sounds just... fabulous.
gravescale 2y ago
> We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work Everyone using C++20 compilers: side-glancing monkey.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  The difference is that you can read the code that ChatGPT generates.
jasonlotito 2y ago
> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. Then no one knows what they are doing. I really don't know any company that doesn't make what could be considered rookie mistakes by some armchair "developer" here on HN.

It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to market your company.

Terretta 2y ago

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let [devs] generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to [whatever]. Except, have you met startup devs? This is by and large the "move fast then unbreak things" approach.

masijo 2y ago
This is why working for startups gives me PTSD. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- almost_usual 2y ago
  The idea of inheriting a ChatGPT code base no one understands now makes it worse.
  - hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
    Just give it to GPT-5 for a refactor, easy!
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      It terrifies me that I have heard people say this unironically.
      - hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
        It’s the natural outcome of SV types denigrating the value of education. Forget knowing anything, just come up with a nice pitch deck and let the LLM write the stack. Not wholly surprised these people are YC backed. I’ve got the impression YC don’t place much weight on technical competence, assuming you can just hire the talent if you know how to sell. Well, now replace “hire some talent” with “get a GPT subscription and YOLO”, and you get the foundation these companies of tomorrow are going to be built on. Which hey, maybe that’s right and they know something I don’t.
SilasX 2y ago
For that matter, has OP even met the HN accepted wisdom? "No one knows what they're doing, everyone's faking it, it's fine if you are too" -- so don't take it as a red flag when your fumbling around keeps blowing up, because it surely must work that way everywhere else. My early rant against this mentality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749
- tmpz22 2y ago
  Its very humbling coming out of startup-land and working with big tech engineers and realizing their tooling runs circles around everybody else and enables them to be much more precise with their work and scale, though it isn't without trade-offs.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Yeah but a lot of that is just the accrual of improvements that is possible with a lot of resources over a long period of time. People working in "big tech" aren't fundamentally better at building reliable tools and systems; the time and resource constraints are entirely different.
    - crabmusket 2y ago
      And the stakes! This outage might have cost the OP $10k. A similar snafu at a larger company might have cost tens of millions or more.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        The big tech tooling probably cost tens of millions of dollars to create, and probably had a couple $10k mistakes on the way to getting it written and running.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
ruszki 2y ago
It’s possible to move fast the same way, but break less things than this. For example, in this case, they said that they introduced tests to mitigate this. I can assure you that introducing tests takes more time than Google searches to check in like 2 minutes what each lines really does.
Kesty 2y ago
The idea of moving fast is to have extensive logs and alerts so you fix all error fasts while they appear without "wasting time" with long expensive tests in a phase where things change every day. 5 days to find out you have "duplicate key" errors in the db is the opposite of fast

mort96 2y ago

Eh I imagine they looked over the code as well, doing code review -- and at first glance, the code looks reasonable. I certainly wasn't able to catch the bug even though I tried to find it (and I was given a tiny collection of lines and the knowledge that there's a bug there!). If anything, I think this says something about how dangerous ChatGPT and similar tools are: reading code is harder than writing code, and when you use ChatGPT, your role stops being that of a programmer and becomes that of a code reviewer. Worse, LLMs are excellent at producing plausible output (I mean that's literally all they do), which means the bugs will look like plausibly correct code as well. I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all.

throw46365 2y ago
> I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all. I think using AI tools to write production code is probably indicative of people who don't really know what they are doing. The best way not to have subtle bugs is to think deeply about your code, not subcontract it out -- whether that is to people far away who both cannot afford to think as deeply about your code and aren't as invested in it, or to an AI that is often right and doesn't know the difference between correct and incorrect. It's just a profound abrogation of good development principles to behave this way. And where is the benefit in doing this repeatedly? You're just going to end up with a codebase nobody really owns on a cognitive level. At least when you look at a StackOverflow answer you see the discussion around it from other real people offering critiques! ETA in advance: and yes, I understand all the comparison points about using third party libraries, and all the left-pad stuff (don't get me started on NPM). But the point stands: the best way not to have bugs is to own your code. To my mind, anyone who is using ChatGPT in this way -- to write whole pieces of business logic, not just to get inspiration -- is failing at their one job. If it's to be yours, it has to come from the brain of someone who is yours too. This is an embarrassing and damaging admission and there is no way around it. ETA (2): code review, as a practice, only works when you and the people who wrote the code have a shared understanding of the context and the goal of the code and are roughly equally invested in getting code through review. Because all the niche cases are illuminated by those discussions and avoided in advance. The less time you've spent on this preamble, the less effective the code review will be. It's a matter of trust and culture as much as it's a matter of comparing requirements with finished code.

PhasmaFelis 2y ago

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. In my experience, hardly anyone in software does know what they're doing, for sufficiently rigorous values of "know what you're doing." We all read about other people's stupid mistakes, and think "haha, I would never have done that, because I know about XYZ!" And then we go off and happily make some equally stupid mistake because we don't know about ABC.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
There’s a difference between not knowing what you are doing and making a mistake.
- PhasmaFelis 2y ago
  An awful lot of mistakes are made because one didn't know something that would have enabled one to avoid it. Not knowing what you don't know is difficult to work around.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- throw46365 2y ago
  The "zen" of LLMs is that they do not see a real distinction between these two things, or either of these two things and success ;-)
throw46365 2y ago
I dunno. I tend to annoy people when taking on jobs by telling people what I am concerned about and do not understand, and then sharing with them the extent to which I have managed to allay my own concerns through research. I turn down a lot of jobs I don't feel confident with; maybe more than I should. An LLM never will.

bogota 2y ago

This is getting more common. I have already had people try to tell me how something works from a chat gpt summary. This would have led to us taking a completely different direction… 5 minutes of reading the actual docs and I found out they were wrong. Now at a new company i have caught several people copy pasting gpt code that is just horrendous. It seems like this is where the industry is headed. The only thing i have found gpt to be good at is solving interview questions although it still uses phantom functions about 50% of the time. The future is bumming me out.

droopyEyelids 2y ago
It’sa Tower of Babel like effect
gravescale 2y ago
Like people who post "here's what ChatGPTx said" instead of their own answer. Quite literally, what is the point? However, I don't think it's really bad for the technical industries long term. It probably does mean that some companies with loose internal quality control and enough shiftless employees pasting enough GPT spew without oversight will go to the wall because their software became unmaintainable and not useful, but this already happens. It's probably not hugely worse than the flood of bootcamp victims who wrote fizzbuzz in Python, get recruited by a credulous, cheap or desperate company and proceed to trash the place if not adequately supervised. If you can't detect bad work being committed, that's mostly on the company, not ChatGPT. Yes, it may make it harder, a bit, but it was oversight you should already have been prepared to have, doubly so if you can't trust employee output. It also probably implies strong QA, which is already a prerequisite of a solid product company. Normal interest rates coming back will cut away companies that waste everyone's time and money by overloading themselves on endlessly compounding technical debt.
- foota 2y ago
  Is the idea here that normal (read: low?) interest rates will let companies spend more time getting things right?

krick 2y ago

I don't really care about them marketing their company, but, Jesus, seriously, that's how software is going to be written now. TBH, I'm not really sure if it's that much different from how it was, but it sounds just... fabulous.

gravescale 2y ago

> We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work Everyone using C++20 compilers: side-glancing monkey.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
The difference is that you can read the code that ChatGPT generates.

jasonlotito 2y ago

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. Then no one knows what they are doing. I really don't know any company that doesn't make what could be considered rookie mistakes by some armchair "developer" here on HN.