7 ms·

> - Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code w

by dizhn 1y ago

> - Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This reminded me of a quarter million dollar software project one of my employers had contracted to a team in a different country. On the face of it - especially if you go and check by the spec sheet - everything was there but the thing was not a cohesive whole. They did not spend one second beyond the spec sheet and none of the common sense things that "follow" from the spec were there. The whole thing was scrapped immediately. With LLMs this kind of work now basically becomes free to do and automatic.

AbstractH24 1y ago
Cheap labor with low EI is/has been what will suffer most from generative AI.
- vages 1y ago
  What does EI mean in this sentence? Tried looking it up and found no definition that stood out.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    Emotional intelligence
Sammi 1y ago
I'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software. Good experienced devs will be able to make better software, but so many inexperienced devs will be regurgitating so much more lousy software at a pace never seen before, it's going to be overwhelming. Or as the original commenter described, they're already being overwhelmed.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- b112 1y ago
  I'm waiting for someone to use an LLM to handle all AWS deployment, without review, and eventual bankrupcy as the result. Even better if the accountants are using LLMs. Or even better, hardware prototyping using LLMs with EEs barely knowing what they are doing. So far, most software dumbassery with LLMs can at least be fixed. Fixing board layouts, or chip designs, not as easy.
  - belter 1y ago
    AWS itself is currently polluting their online documentation with GenAI generated snippets...I can only imagine what horrors lurk on their internal code base. In a move similar to the movie War Games, maybe humans are now out of the loop, and before a final commit LLMs are deciding....
- conartist6 1y ago
  Yes, but some of us have seen this coming for a long time now. I will have my word in the matter before all is said and done. While everyone is busy pivoting to AI I keep my head down and build the tools that will be needed to clean up the mess...
  - distalx 1y ago
    Any hints on what kind of tools you're creating for the inevitable mess?
    - conartist6 1y ago
      https://github.com/bablr-lang/ https://github.com/bablr-lang/ I'm building a universal DOM for code so that we should see an explosion in code whose purpose is to help clean up other code. If you want to write code that makes changes to a tree of HTML nodes, you can pretty much write that code once and it will run in any web browser. If you want to write code that makes a new program by changing a tree of syntax nodes, there are an incredible number of different and wholly incompatible environments for that code to run in. Transform authors are likely forced to pick one or two engines to support, and anyone who needs to run a lot of codemods will probably need to install 5-10 different execution engines. Most people seem not to notice or care about this situation or realize that their tools are vastly underserving their potential just because we can't come up with the basic standards necessary to enable universal execution of codemod code, which also means there are drastically lower incentives to write custom codemods and lint rules than there could/should be
steveBK123 1y ago
I dealt with a 4x as expensive statement-of-work fixed price contract that was nearshored and then subbed out to a revolving cast of characters. The SOW was so poorly specified that it was easy to maliciously comply with it, and it had no real acceptance tests. As a result legal didn't think IT would have a leg to stand on arguing with the vendor on the contract, and we ended up constantly re-negotiating on cost for them to make fixes just to get a codebase that never went live. An example of how bad it was - imagine you have a database of metadata to generate downloader tasks in a tool like airflow, but instead of doing any sane groupings of say the 100 sources with 1000 files each every day into a 100ish tasks, it generated a 700,000 task graph because its gone task-per-file-per-day. We were using some sort of SaaS dag/scheduler tool at the time and if we deployed we'd have been using 5x more tasks than the entire decades-old, 200 person person were using to date, and paid for it. Or they implemented the file arrival SLA checker such that it only alerted when a late file arrived. So if a file never arrives it never alerts. Or when a daily file arrives a week late, you get the alert on arrival, not a week ago when it was late.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  I have seen the revolving cast of characters bit play out several times. It’s as if they hire 1 or 2 competent people and rotate them to face the client that is currently screaming the loudest. To be fair though, in your case it aounds like 51% (and maybe even 75+%) of the defect was in the specifications.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    Oh yeah, 75-90% of the outcome was determined by the bad specification/contract. You can have a loose spec and trust the team to do the right thing if it's an internal team you will allocate budget/time to iterate. Not if you have a fixed time & cost contract.
  - gopher_space 1y ago
    We found that any competent offshore contact would leave for a better job within a month.
- 1y ago
MaxBarraclough 1y ago
This sounds like a tale of failed 'waterfall model' software development. Was it not possible to sees the quality issues before the project was finished?
- pjmlp 1y ago
  As participant in many kinds of similar projects, lets put it this way, the crew already knows that the ship has a few holes while at the harbour, but captain decides for sailing anyway. Eventually you will find yourself on deep waters, with the ship lower than it should be, routinely taking out buckets of water, whishing for the nearest island, only to repair ship with whatever is on that island, and keep sailing to the nearest one, with the buckets ready. After a couple of enterprise projects, one learns it is either move into another business, or learn to cope with this approach. Which might be specially trick given the job landscape on someone's region.
  - fredrikholm 1y ago
    My suspicion is that all type of work is this; a universal issue where quality and forethought are at odds with quantity and good enough (where good enough trends towards worse over time). Before SE I had a bunch of vastly different jobs and they all suffered from something akin to crab bucket mentality where doing a good job was something you got away with. I've had jobs where doing the right thing was something you kept to yourself or suffer for it.
  - pydry 1y ago
    This almost seems to be a weird artefact of capitalism. Ive worked on several projects which at some point became obviously doomed to almost everybody in the trenches but management/investors/owners kept believing. Perception of reality did not permeate the class divide. I wish I could make $$$ off this insight somehow but im not sure it's possible.
    - breppp 1y ago
      Create a revolutionary movement, take over the state and steal the money of the lower classes
viraptor 1y ago
> They did not spend one second beyond the spec sheet and none of the common sense things that "follow" from the spec were there. That's how lots of the early outsourced projects ended up. Perfectly matching the spec and not working. > The whole thing was scrapped immediately. And that's how it ended up too. everything old is new again.
euroderf 1y ago
> With LLMs this kind of work now basically becomes free to do and automatic. So is this going to kill the demand for offshored code ? If you can get the same needs-babysitting code quality in no-time and no-budget ?

by dizhn 1y ago

AbstractH24 1y ago

Cheap labor with low EI is/has been what will suffer most from generative AI.

vages 1y ago
What does EI mean in this sentence? Tried looking it up and found no definition that stood out.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  Emotional intelligence

Sammi 1y ago

I'm expecting to see so much more poor quality software being made. We're going to be swimming in an ocean of bad software. Good experienced devs will be able to make better software, but so many inexperienced devs will be regurgitating so much more lousy software at a pace never seen before, it's going to be overwhelming. Or as the original commenter described, they're already being overwhelmed.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
b112 1y ago
I'm waiting for someone to use an LLM to handle all AWS deployment, without review, and eventual bankrupcy as the result. Even better if the accountants are using LLMs. Or even better, hardware prototyping using LLMs with EEs barely knowing what they are doing. So far, most software dumbassery with LLMs can at least be fixed. Fixing board layouts, or chip designs, not as easy.
- belter 1y ago
  AWS itself is currently polluting their online documentation with GenAI generated snippets...I can only imagine what horrors lurk on their internal code base. In a move similar to the movie War Games, maybe humans are now out of the loop, and before a final commit LLMs are deciding....
conartist6 1y ago
Yes, but some of us have seen this coming for a long time now. I will have my word in the matter before all is said and done. While everyone is busy pivoting to AI I keep my head down and build the tools that will be needed to clean up the mess...
- distalx 1y ago
  Any hints on what kind of tools you're creating for the inevitable mess?
  - conartist6 1y ago
    https://github.com/bablr-lang/ https://github.com/bablr-lang/ I'm building a universal DOM for code so that we should see an explosion in code whose purpose is to help clean up other code. If you want to write code that makes changes to a tree of HTML nodes, you can pretty much write that code once and it will run in any web browser. If you want to write code that makes a new program by changing a tree of syntax nodes, there are an incredible number of different and wholly incompatible environments for that code to run in. Transform authors are likely forced to pick one or two engines to support, and anyone who needs to run a lot of codemods will probably need to install 5-10 different execution engines. Most people seem not to notice or care about this situation or realize that their tools are vastly underserving their potential just because we can't come up with the basic standards necessary to enable universal execution of codemod code, which also means there are drastically lower incentives to write custom codemods and lint rules than there could/should be

steveBK123 1y ago

I dealt with a 4x as expensive statement-of-work fixed price contract that was nearshored and then subbed out to a revolving cast of characters. The SOW was so poorly specified that it was easy to maliciously comply with it, and it had no real acceptance tests. As a result legal didn't think IT would have a leg to stand on arguing with the vendor on the contract, and we ended up constantly re-negotiating on cost for them to make fixes just to get a codebase that never went live. An example of how bad it was - imagine you have a database of metadata to generate downloader tasks in a tool like airflow, but instead of doing any sane groupings of say the 100 sources with 1000 files each every day into a 100ish tasks, it generated a 700,000 task graph because its gone task-per-file-per-day. We were using some sort of SaaS dag/scheduler tool at the time and if we deployed we'd have been using 5x more tasks than the entire decades-old, 200 person person were using to date, and paid for it. Or they implemented the file arrival SLA checker such that it only alerted when a late file arrived. So if a file never arrives it never alerts. Or when a daily file arrives a week late, you get the alert on arrival, not a week ago when it was late.

sokoloff 1y ago
I have seen the revolving cast of characters bit play out several times. It’s as if they hire 1 or 2 competent people and rotate them to face the client that is currently screaming the loudest. To be fair though, in your case it aounds like 51% (and maybe even 75+%) of the defect was in the specifications.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  Oh yeah, 75-90% of the outcome was determined by the bad specification/contract. You can have a loose spec and trust the team to do the right thing if it's an internal team you will allocate budget/time to iterate. Not if you have a fixed time & cost contract.
- gopher_space 1y ago
  We found that any competent offshore contact would leave for a better job within a month.
1y ago

MaxBarraclough 1y ago

This sounds like a tale of failed 'waterfall model' software development. Was it not possible to sees the quality issues before the project was finished?

pjmlp 1y ago
As participant in many kinds of similar projects, lets put it this way, the crew already knows that the ship has a few holes while at the harbour, but captain decides for sailing anyway. Eventually you will find yourself on deep waters, with the ship lower than it should be, routinely taking out buckets of water, whishing for the nearest island, only to repair ship with whatever is on that island, and keep sailing to the nearest one, with the buckets ready. After a couple of enterprise projects, one learns it is either move into another business, or learn to cope with this approach. Which might be specially trick given the job landscape on someone's region.
- fredrikholm 1y ago
  My suspicion is that all type of work is this; a universal issue where quality and forethought are at odds with quantity and good enough (where good enough trends towards worse over time). Before SE I had a bunch of vastly different jobs and they all suffered from something akin to crab bucket mentality where doing a good job was something you got away with. I've had jobs where doing the right thing was something you kept to yourself or suffer for it.
- pydry 1y ago
  This almost seems to be a weird artefact of capitalism. Ive worked on several projects which at some point became obviously doomed to almost everybody in the trenches but management/investors/owners kept believing. Perception of reality did not permeate the class divide. I wish I could make $$$ off this insight somehow but im not sure it's possible.
  - breppp 1y ago
    Create a revolutionary movement, take over the state and steal the money of the lower classes

viraptor 1y ago

> They did not spend one second beyond the spec sheet and none of the common sense things that "follow" from the spec were there. That's how lots of the early outsourced projects ended up. Perfectly matching the spec and not working. > The whole thing was scrapped immediately. And that's how it ended up too. everything old is new again.

euroderf 1y ago

> With LLMs this kind of work now basically becomes free to do and automatic. So is this going to kill the demand for offshored code ? If you can get the same needs-babysitting code quality in no-time and no-budget ?