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This comment section is unbelievable lol. I'm genuinely struggling to believe this many people would let code into a codebase without review.

apwell23 1y ago
why should we give even tiny bit F about our employer when they are using AI to do interviews?
- exasperaited 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
  - skeaker 1y ago
    Not all software is life or death. I'd argue that very little of it is.
    - jedimastert 1y ago
      I'm sure the devs at horizon IT thought the same thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/08/post-office-scandal-inquiry-horizon-it-scandal https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/08/post-office-...
      - skeaker 1y ago
        Point not taken. That remains as the vast minority of all software. I can't link a counterexample because nobody would ever put an article saying "indie game has bug" or "IoT coffeepot has to be rebooted every few months," but I can assure you the majority of software has much lower stakes.
exasperaited 1y ago
I am not struggling to believe it at all. Because I am an old guy with a CS degree but decades of web development experience. Apparently this is called being "a legacy developer". This is the logical conclusion of the indiscipline of undereducated developers who have copied and pasted throughout their career. This reality is then expressed as "but humans also copy and paste" as if this makes it OK to just hand that task over now to an AI that might do it better, where the solution is to train people to not copy and paste. Everything about AI is the same story, over and over again: just pump it out. Consequences are what lawyers are for. It's really interesting to me that within basically a generation we've gone from people sneering at developers with old fashioned, niche development skills and methodologies (fortran, cobol, Ada) to sneering at people with the old-fashioned mindset that knowing what your code is doing is a fundamental facet of the job.
- tempodox 1y ago
  +1. By now I've given up hope that software development will ever become a true engineering discipline, or even just somewhat close to it. Bungling it is so much cheaper and practically everyone seems to accept the current bad state of affairs. Only small subfields are exceptions to this.
  - ozim 1y ago
    I pretty much don’t know a team that doesn’t have at least testing/staging environments. I don’t know a team that doesn’t use GIT and some issue tracker. That’s already engineering. Your sentiment is cute but I think you have some romantic vision of what „real engineering” is.
    - exasperaited 1y ago
      Those are (trivial) software project management. It's a tiny part of the picture. Software engineering goes a lot deeper than that; look at any serious accredited syllabus. But almost nobody practises it these days, you are right. The web kind of blurred the line between software and document for a while and a lot of stuff got lost. That's not a reason to practise even less.

apwell23 1y ago

why should we give even tiny bit F about our employer when they are using AI to do interviews?

exasperaited 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- skeaker 1y ago
  Not all software is life or death. I'd argue that very little of it is.
  - jedimastert 1y ago
    I'm sure the devs at horizon IT thought the same thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/08/post-office-scandal-inquiry-horizon-it-scandal https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/08/post-office-...
    - skeaker 1y ago
      Point not taken. That remains as the vast minority of all software. I can't link a counterexample because nobody would ever put an article saying "indie game has bug" or "IoT coffeepot has to be rebooted every few months," but I can assure you the majority of software has much lower stakes.

exasperaited 1y ago

I am not struggling to believe it at all. Because I am an old guy with a CS degree but decades of web development experience. Apparently this is called being "a legacy developer". This is the logical conclusion of the indiscipline of undereducated developers who have copied and pasted throughout their career. This reality is then expressed as "but humans also copy and paste" as if this makes it OK to just hand that task over now to an AI that might do it better, where the solution is to train people to not copy and paste. Everything about AI is the same story, over and over again: just pump it out. Consequences are what lawyers are for. It's really interesting to me that within basically a generation we've gone from people sneering at developers with old fashioned, niche development skills and methodologies (fortran, cobol, Ada) to sneering at people with the old-fashioned mindset that knowing what your code is doing is a fundamental facet of the job.

tempodox 1y ago
+1. By now I've given up hope that software development will ever become a true engineering discipline, or even just somewhat close to it. Bungling it is so much cheaper and practically everyone seems to accept the current bad state of affairs. Only small subfields are exceptions to this.
- ozim 1y ago
  I pretty much don’t know a team that doesn’t have at least testing/staging environments. I don’t know a team that doesn’t use GIT and some issue tracker. That’s already engineering. Your sentiment is cute but I think you have some romantic vision of what „real engineering” is.
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    Those are (trivial) software project management. It's a tiny part of the picture. Software engineering goes a lot deeper than that; look at any serious accredited syllabus. But almost nobody practises it these days, you are right. The web kind of blurred the line between software and document for a while and a lot of stuff got lost. That's not a reason to practise even less.