4 ms·

There is demand for non scalable, not committed to be maintained code where smaller issues can tolerated. This demand is currently underserved as coding is some

There is demand for non scalable, not committed to be maintained code where smaller issues can tolerated. This demand is currently underserved as coding is somewhat expensive and focused on critical functions.

Retr0id 8mo ago
What are some examples of when buggy code can be tolerated?
- simonw 8mo ago
  If the code is being used by a small group of people who are willing to figure out and share workarounds for those bugs - internal staff, for example.
  - skydhash 8mo ago
    Aren’t you also paying internal staff for their time. Waisting their time is waisting your money.
    - simonw 8mo ago
      I've been in these situations before. If there's a known bug in an internal tool that would take the development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s - it's often smarter to send around an email saying "don't click the Froople button more than once, and if you do tell Benjamin and he'll fix it in the database for you". Of course LLMs change that equation now because the fix might take a few minutes instead.
      - dns_snek 8mo ago
        > development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s What about the non-fictional 99.999999999% of the world that doesn't make $1000/hour?
        bubblewand 8mo ago
        Large companies are often very bad at organizing work, to the tune of increasing the cost of everything by a large multiple over what you'd think it should be. Most of that cost wouldn't be productive developer time.
        simonw 8mo ago
        It costs them single digit thousands instead.
      - zahlman 8mo ago
        > If there's a known bug in an internal tool that would take the development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s - it's often smarter to send around an email saying "don't click the Froople button more than once, and if you do tell Benjamin and he'll fix it in the database for you". How much will Benjamin's time responding to those calls cost in the long run?
        simonw 8mo ago
        Hopefully none, because your staff will read the email and not click the button more than once. Or one of them will do it, Benjamin will glare at them and they'll learn not to do it again and warn their coworkers about it. Or... Benjamin will spend a ton of time on this and use that to successfully argue for the bug to get fixed. (Or your organization is dysfunctional and ends up wasting a ton of money on time that could have been saved if the development team had fixed the bug.)
    - jimbokun 8mo ago
      The alternative is the staff having no software at all to help with their task which wastes even more of their time.
- dktp 8mo ago
  From recent personal examples We have a somewhat complicated OpenSearch reindexing logic and we had some issue where it happened more regularly than it should. I vibecoded a dashboard visualizing in a graph exactly which index gets reindexed when and into what. Code works, a little rough around the edges. But it serves the purpose and saved me a ton of time Another example, in an internal project we made a recent change where we need to send specific headers depending on the environment. Mostly GET endpoint where my workflow is checking the API through browser. The list of headers is long, but predetermined. I vibecoded an extension that lets you pick the header and allows me to work with my regular workflow, rather than Postman or cURL or whatever. A little buggy UI, but good enough. The whole team uses it I'm not a frontend developer and either of these would take me a lot of time to do by hand
- Itoldmyselfso 8mo ago
  Points at the public sector
  - tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
    Any large enterprise. The software organisations write for themselves is pretty dire in most cases even without AI.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- hiuioejfjkf 8mo ago
  [dead]
- jodrellblank 8mo ago
  You are setting up to say "I wouldn't tolerate that" for any example given, but if you look at the market and what makes people actually leave, instead of what makes people complain, then basically anything that isn't life-and-death, safety critical, big-money-losing, or data corrupting is tolerable. There's plenty of complaints about Microsoft, Apple, Gmail, Android, and all kinds of 3rd party niche business systems. [Edit: DanLuu "one week of bugs": https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ ] All the decades people tolerated blue-screens on Windows. All the software which regularly segfaulted years ago. The permeation of "have you tried turning it off and on again" into everyday life. The "ship sooner, patch later" culture. The refusal to use garbage collected or memory managed languages or formal verification over C/C++/etc because some bugs are more tolerable than the cost/effort/performance costs to change. Display and formatting bugs, e.g. glitches in video games. When error conditions aren't handled - code that crashes if you enter blank parameters. Bugs in utility code that doesn't run often like the installer. One software I installed yesterday told me to disable some Windows services before the install, then the installer tried to start the services at the end of the install and couldn't, so it failed and finished without finishing installing everything. This reminded me that I knew about that, because that buggy behaviour has been there for years and I've tripped over it before; at least two major versions. Another one I regularly update tells me to close its running processes before proceding with the install, but after it's got to that state, it won't let me procede and it has no way to refresh or rescan to detect the running process has finished. That's been there for years and several major versions as well. One more famous example is """I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you’re leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.""" - Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP. I've a feeling that was admitted about 37 Signals and Basecamp, it was common to restart Ruby-on-Rails code frequently, but I can't find a source to back that up.
- nananana9 8mo ago
  Leaf code. Anything that you won't have to build upon long-term and is not super mission critical. Data visualizers, dashboards, internal tools. Pretty much everywhere where a 80% working tool is better than no tool, and without AI the opportunity cost to write the tool would be too high.

Retr0id 8mo ago

What are some examples of when buggy code can be tolerated?

simonw 8mo ago
If the code is being used by a small group of people who are willing to figure out and share workarounds for those bugs - internal staff, for example.
- skydhash 8mo ago
  Aren’t you also paying internal staff for their time. Waisting their time is waisting your money.
  - simonw 8mo ago
    I've been in these situations before. If there's a known bug in an internal tool that would take the development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s - it's often smarter to send around an email saying "don't click the Froople button more than once, and if you do tell Benjamin and he'll fix it in the database for you". Of course LLMs change that equation now because the fix might take a few minutes instead.
    - dns_snek 8mo ago
      > development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s What about the non-fictional 99.999999999% of the world that doesn't make $1000/hour?
      - bubblewand 8mo ago
        Large companies are often very bad at organizing work, to the tune of increasing the cost of everything by a large multiple over what you'd think it should be. Most of that cost wouldn't be productive developer time.
      - simonw 8mo ago
        It costs them single digit thousands instead.
    - zahlman 8mo ago
      > If there's a known bug in an internal tool that would take the development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s - it's often smarter to send around an email saying "don't click the Froople button more than once, and if you do tell Benjamin and he'll fix it in the database for you". How much will Benjamin's time responding to those calls cost in the long run?
      - simonw 8mo ago
        Hopefully none, because your staff will read the email and not click the button more than once. Or one of them will do it, Benjamin will glare at them and they'll learn not to do it again and warn their coworkers about it. Or... Benjamin will spend a ton of time on this and use that to successfully argue for the bug to get fixed. (Or your organization is dysfunctional and ends up wasting a ton of money on time that could have been saved if the development team had fixed the bug.)
  - jimbokun 8mo ago
    The alternative is the staff having no software at all to help with their task which wastes even more of their time.
dktp 8mo ago
From recent personal examples We have a somewhat complicated OpenSearch reindexing logic and we had some issue where it happened more regularly than it should. I vibecoded a dashboard visualizing in a graph exactly which index gets reindexed when and into what. Code works, a little rough around the edges. But it serves the purpose and saved me a ton of time Another example, in an internal project we made a recent change where we need to send specific headers depending on the environment. Mostly GET endpoint where my workflow is checking the API through browser. The list of headers is long, but predetermined. I vibecoded an extension that lets you pick the header and allows me to work with my regular workflow, rather than Postman or cURL or whatever. A little buggy UI, but good enough. The whole team uses it I'm not a frontend developer and either of these would take me a lot of time to do by hand
Itoldmyselfso 8mo ago
Points at the public sector
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
  Any large enterprise. The software organisations write for themselves is pretty dire in most cases even without AI.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
hiuioejfjkf 8mo ago
[dead]
jodrellblank 8mo ago
You are setting up to say "I wouldn't tolerate that" for any example given, but if you look at the market and what makes people actually leave, instead of what makes people complain, then basically anything that isn't life-and-death, safety critical, big-money-losing, or data corrupting is tolerable. There's plenty of complaints about Microsoft, Apple, Gmail, Android, and all kinds of 3rd party niche business systems. [Edit: DanLuu "one week of bugs": https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ ] All the decades people tolerated blue-screens on Windows. All the software which regularly segfaulted years ago. The permeation of "have you tried turning it off and on again" into everyday life. The "ship sooner, patch later" culture. The refusal to use garbage collected or memory managed languages or formal verification over C/C++/etc because some bugs are more tolerable than the cost/effort/performance costs to change. Display and formatting bugs, e.g. glitches in video games. When error conditions aren't handled - code that crashes if you enter blank parameters. Bugs in utility code that doesn't run often like the installer. One software I installed yesterday told me to disable some Windows services before the install, then the installer tried to start the services at the end of the install and couldn't, so it failed and finished without finishing installing everything. This reminded me that I knew about that, because that buggy behaviour has been there for years and I've tripped over it before; at least two major versions. Another one I regularly update tells me to close its running processes before proceding with the install, but after it's got to that state, it won't let me procede and it has no way to refresh or rescan to detect the running process has finished. That's been there for years and several major versions as well. One more famous example is """I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you’re leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.""" - Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP. I've a feeling that was admitted about 37 Signals and Basecamp, it was common to restart Ruby-on-Rails code frequently, but I can't find a source to back that up.
nananana9 8mo ago
Leaf code. Anything that you won't have to build upon long-term and is not super mission critical. Data visualizers, dashboards, internal tools. Pretty much everywhere where a 80% working tool is better than no tool, and without AI the opportunity cost to write the tool would be too high.