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That's an alright takeaway: the team made a rookie mistake and then they made a PR mistake by oversharing. Otherwise, I think this comment thread is a classic

That's an alright takeaway: the team made a rookie mistake and then they made a PR mistake by oversharing. Otherwise, I think this comment thread is a classic example why company engineering blogs choose to be boring. Better ten articles that have some useful information, than a single article that allows the commentariat to pile on and ruin your reputation.

hobs 2y ago
A mistake is interesting if the mistake itself or the RCA is interesting - using sloppy methods isn't really that interesting on its face.
sillysaurusx 2y ago
I think it’s an unfair takeaway. I have over a decade of experience and still had to stare at the line to find the bug. If that makes them incompetent, I stand with them. It’s a bug I’ve seen people make in other contexts, not just chatbots. The AI angle is probably why people are piling on. There’s a latent fear that AI will take our jobs, and this is a great way to skewer home that we’re still needed. For now. The one thing I will say is that it probably wouldn’t take me days to track it down. But that’s only because I have lots of experience dealing with bugs the way that The Wolf deals with backs of cars. When you’re trying to run a startup on top of everything else, it can be easy to miss. I’m happy they gave us a glimpse of early stage growing pains, and I don’t think this was a PR fumble. It shows that lots of people want what they’re making, which is roughly the only thing that matters.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
Eh, I think it speaks fairly well for them. On the one hand it does seem like a fairly inexperienced organization with some pretty undercooked release and testing processes, but on the other hand all that stuff is ultimately fixable. This is a relatively harmless way of learning that lesson. Admitting a problem is the first step toward fixing it. A culture of ass-covering is much harder to fix, and will definitely get in the way of addressing these types of issues
Aurornis 2y ago
> Better ten articles that have some useful information, than a single article that allows the commentariat to pile on and ruin your reputation. Pile-on aside, the problem with this blog article is that it doesn't really have much of a useful takeaway. They didn't even really talk the offending line in detail. They didn't really talk about what did to fix their engineering pipelines. It was just a story about how they let ChatGPT write some code, the code was buggy, and the bug was hard to spot because they relied on customers e-mailing them about it in a way that only happened when they were sleeping. It's not really a postmortem, it's a story about fast and loose startup times. Which could be interesting in itself, except it's being presented more as an engineering postmortem blog minus the actionable lessons. That's why everyone is confused about why this company posted this as a lesson: The lesson is obvious and, frankly, better left as a quiet story for the founders to chuckle about to their friends.

hobs 2y ago

A mistake is interesting if the mistake itself or the RCA is interesting - using sloppy methods isn't really that interesting on its face.

sillysaurusx 2y ago

I think it’s an unfair takeaway. I have over a decade of experience and still had to stare at the line to find the bug. If that makes them incompetent, I stand with them. It’s a bug I’ve seen people make in other contexts, not just chatbots. The AI angle is probably why people are piling on. There’s a latent fear that AI will take our jobs, and this is a great way to skewer home that we’re still needed. For now. The one thing I will say is that it probably wouldn’t take me days to track it down. But that’s only because I have lots of experience dealing with bugs the way that The Wolf deals with backs of cars. When you’re trying to run a startup on top of everything else, it can be easy to miss. I’m happy they gave us a glimpse of early stage growing pains, and I don’t think this was a PR fumble. It shows that lots of people want what they’re making, which is roughly the only thing that matters.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

Eh, I think it speaks fairly well for them. On the one hand it does seem like a fairly inexperienced organization with some pretty undercooked release and testing processes, but on the other hand all that stuff is ultimately fixable. This is a relatively harmless way of learning that lesson. Admitting a problem is the first step toward fixing it. A culture of ass-covering is much harder to fix, and will definitely get in the way of addressing these types of issues

Aurornis 2y ago

> Better ten articles that have some useful information, than a single article that allows the commentariat to pile on and ruin your reputation. Pile-on aside, the problem with this blog article is that it doesn't really have much of a useful takeaway. They didn't even really talk the offending line in detail. They didn't really talk about what did to fix their engineering pipelines. It was just a story about how they let ChatGPT write some code, the code was buggy, and the bug was hard to spot because they relied on customers e-mailing them about it in a way that only happened when they were sleeping. It's not really a postmortem, it's a story about fast and loose startup times. Which could be interesting in itself, except it's being presented more as an engineering postmortem blog minus the actionable lessons. That's why everyone is confused about why this company posted this as a lesson: The lesson is obvious and, frankly, better left as a quiet story for the founders to chuckle about to their friends.