6 ms·

This agent stuff is really making me lose respect for our industry All the years of discussing programming/security best practices Then cut to 2026 and sudden

This agent stuff is really making me lose respect for our industry All the years of discussing programming/security best practices Then cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matter, determinism is going out the window, and its becoming standard practice to have bots on our local PC constantly running unknown shell commands

JuniperMesos 7mo ago
Meta has never in its entire existence been known for caring about software quality.
- a-french-anon 7mo ago
  M8... https://github.com/facebook/infer https://github.com/facebook/infer
aeblyve 7mo ago
People salivate so hard at the thought of the high level of automation promised that they're willing to do away with privacy altogether and live in Data Communism. My thinking is, this will increase the demand for backup and other resilience solutions.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  > People salivate so hard at the thought of the high level of automation promised that they're willing to do away with privacy altogether and live in Data Communism. This occurred long time ago comrade 'aeblyve.
  - aeblyve 7mo ago
    ‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or this may express the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetter. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation leads sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ Marx
    - _doctor_love 7mo ago
      He wasn’t wrong on that one.
polothesecond 7mo ago
> Then cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matter Is this new to people? I figured this out when I first entered the industry. The messages have never been particularly subtle.
- exolymph 7mo ago
  Right? I was like when did software quality matter. Let alone code quality lol
Apocryphon 7mo ago
Turns out all of the frenzy of the ZIRP era is piddling compared to what happens when ZIRP is taken away.
yoyohello13 7mo ago
How can you respect an industry that doesn't respect itself?
testplzignore 7mo ago
Our industry has never been serious about security. We all download and run unvetted code via package managers every day. At least now the insanity is out in the open. We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes.
- sunrunner 7mo ago
  > We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes. And then we won't need to, because at that point it will be too late.
- asdff 7mo ago
  I keep getting so depressed thinking about the inevitable. Quite simply, humans can't scale or iteratively improve. We still need to eat, we still need to sleep, we can only think on one thread at a time basically, we take 20 years to get to our prime, which is a fleeting moment, while most of our lifespan is spent in a state of decline of capability. AI humanoid robot from the near future doesn't need to eat or sleep, can work 24/7, can compute thousands of processes in parallel, is the same fungible unit as any other humanoid robot, forever with some maintenance. Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world? It is more profitable for the company to have humans go extinct and maximize planetary resource use to its fullest extent possible. Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >and don't even realize it. Oh, many of us realize it, but doing anything about Moloch is much, much harder.
  - nancyminusone 7mo ago
    To what end though? Are the robots going to take over and trade busy work amongst themselves forever? What would that accomplish?
    - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
superb_dev 7mo ago
I’ve never had respect for the industry as a whole, only individuals within. There has a been a serious lack of rigor and professionalism in software engineering for as long as I’ve been a part of it
- jihadjihad 7mo ago
  It's a slap in the face that we tack engineering onto it. A very small percentage of software engineering is as rigorous as actual engineering.
  - dgxyz 7mo ago
    As an actual engineer who moved into software "engineering", yes this. It kills me.
    - DANmode 7mo ago
      Top three things lacking? (In your personal opinion)
      - dgxyz 7mo ago
        Fads and fashion over strong, tested technology. Attitude that you can fix broken stuff later and customers are fine with it. Charlatans and fuckwits everywhere who wouldn't last a second in a traditional engineering discipline.
        DANmode 7mo ago
        Checks out. and thank you!
  - emptyfile 7mo ago
    If it makes you feel any better, I don't think that's the case in most of the non English speaking world. Mostly we're just called programmers.
  - 7mo ago
edf13 7mo ago
It’s a nightmare… the problem is it’s far too easy for people to set these agents up - without understanding the security implications. We’ve covered so many issues already on our blog (grith.ai)
wnevets 7mo ago
The number of wasted hours spent talking about code quality and patterns has to be astronomical.
- throwawaytea 7mo ago
  Don't worry, ai read all the transcripts and blogs and emails and has at least ingested some of the ethos in its outputs. I self taught and wrote a small saas in 2017. Pays well enough to support me. I'm building a new one using AI this year. I promise you, it's better built and more secure than what my previous still in use Saas is.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
kstenerud 7mo ago
I think it's batshit crazy. That's why I wrote yoloAI, so I could sandbox it up properly and control EXACTLY what comes out of that sandbox, diff style. https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai I can't go back anymore. Going back to a non-sandboxed Claude feels like going back to a non-adblocked browser.
heisenbit 7mo ago
Agents are providing to employees the long overdue benefits limited liability companies long enjoyed: Gambling with upside for themselves and other peoples downsides.
- nickpinkston 7mo ago
  That's a fun insight. Have you / others written about this?
  - moffkalast 7mo ago
    They technically have, just now.
  - BoxFour 7mo ago
    “Heads I win, tails you lose” as a business concept has been written about quite a bit. “The Gervais Principle” is an oft-cited one.
piva00 7mo ago
We didn't collectively decided, we've got this forced down our throats to apply a novel tool to any imaginable situation because the execs got antsy about being left behind. A truly absurd amount of capital was deployed which triggered a cascade of reactions by the people in charge of capital at other places. They are extremely anxious that everything will change under their feet, and if they don't start using as much as humanly possible of it right about now they die. That's it. The tools have definitely found some use, there's more to learn on how else they can be used, and maybe over time smart people will settle on ways to wrangle it well. The messaging from the execs though, is not that, it is "you'll be measured on how much you use this, we don't know for what or how, it's for you to figure out but don't dare to not use it". I do understand their anxiety, their job is to not let their companies die, and make the most money as they can in the process; a seemingly major shift on the foundations of their orgs will cause fear. But we have not collectively decided that it was safe, and good, to run rampant with these tools without caring for all that was learnt since software was invented...
- dgxyz 7mo ago
  This wasn't really forced on us. The whole industry is like a fashion show and has been for a long time. This is just exceptionally stupid compared to moderately stupid things before. I see it ore that everyone's wearing pink feathered chicken suits because it's in fashion. If you don't wear a pink feathered chicken suit then you're a luddite scumbag who doesn't deserve the respect of your peers. However some of us still have enough self-respect not to be seen dead in a pink feathered chicken suit. I mean I'm still pissed off at half the other stuff we do in the industry. I haven't even really looked at the chicken suits yet.
  - quantified 7mo ago
    Force is seeping in. Managements are expecting that LLM-driven prouctivity-enhancers will be deployed and give broad-based boosts. More are each week. Supposedly cheaper than people. Those that aren't yet might be soon. When your performance review includes facility with and productivity with LLM tools, you are being forced.
  - 7mo ago
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
antonvs 7mo ago
The media isn’t helping. This wasn’t a “rogue AI”. It was a system that was given permission by a human operator. We don’t say “a rogue plane killed 300 people today when it crashed into a mountain”. The only difference in the AI case is that some people are attempting to shift blame for their incompetence into a computer system, and the media is going along with it because it increases clicks.
- cassianoleal 7mo ago
  > It was a system that was given permission by a human operator. From TFA: "But the agent also independently publicly replied to the question after analyzing it, without getting approval first."
  - antonvs 7mo ago
    Again, these are systems that have been explicitly given the ability to perform these actions. Trying to claim that it was somehow the AI’s fault is sheer incompetence and/or self-serving deceptiveness. You can’t authorize a system to take some action and then complain when it takes that action. The “approval” you quoted is not a security constraint. Someone who confuses it for a security constraint is incompetent.
  - Barrin92 7mo ago
    the ridiculous anthropomorphism is killing me. Software 'agents' can't ask for 'approval', they're not persons. That's like saying my script didn't ask me for approval to modify the system after I ran it with sudo privileges. The developer is solely responsible for what APIs they expose to a bot. No you can't say your software agent was grumpy and mean and had a bad day. It is not a human intern, it is an unreliable chatbot who someone ran with permissions it should not have had.
zzgo 7mo ago
> cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matter I saw the sea change in 2008 when quality process got replaced with velocity and testing tasks. I've watched everything from Experian and health record data leaks to Windows 11 since that change. Software quality hasn't mattered for a long time.
dr_kiszonka 7mo ago
I think it might be because we (or at least I) used to associate insecure actions with people, not computers. Computers should know better, right? Recently, I spotted that Opus 4.6 found config files for one of its tools and gave itself access to my whole filesystem. Similarly, Gemini CLI will rewrite itself if you let it.
suhputt 7mo ago
[dead]
lofaszvanitt 7mo ago
The whole agent ecosystem is a ridiculous shitshow. All of this because you need to ASAP find something believable to sell your overinflated, bullshit machine to the masses. Otherwise the bubble will burst.
mancerayder 7mo ago
There's nothing "collectively" about it. I don't know what industry you work in, but in mine it's a top down mandate to use AI everywhere, tracked with KPIs, from the CEO down, and supported and pressured by companies like Amazon and MS. We're the dummies that have to run around picking up dookies like a new puppy in the house.
brian_r_hall 7mo ago
The frustrating part is watching all the careful thinking about reliability and failure modes get thrown out the window the second something new gets hyped. It's not even that people disagree with the principles, they just stop applying them.
webagent255 7mo ago
[dead]

JuniperMesos 7mo ago

Meta has never in its entire existence been known for caring about software quality.

a-french-anon 7mo ago
M8... https://github.com/facebook/infer https://github.com/facebook/infer

aeblyve 7mo ago

People salivate so hard at the thought of the high level of automation promised that they're willing to do away with privacy altogether and live in Data Communism. My thinking is, this will increase the demand for backup and other resilience solutions.

_doctor_love 7mo ago
> People salivate so hard at the thought of the high level of automation promised that they're willing to do away with privacy altogether and live in Data Communism. This occurred long time ago comrade 'aeblyve.
- aeblyve 7mo ago
  ‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or this may express the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetter. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation leads sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ Marx
  - _doctor_love 7mo ago
    He wasn’t wrong on that one.

polothesecond 7mo ago

> Then cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matter Is this new to people? I figured this out when I first entered the industry. The messages have never been particularly subtle.

exolymph 7mo ago
Right? I was like when did software quality matter. Let alone code quality lol

Apocryphon 7mo ago

Turns out all of the frenzy of the ZIRP era is piddling compared to what happens when ZIRP is taken away.

yoyohello13 7mo ago

How can you respect an industry that doesn't respect itself?

testplzignore 7mo ago

Our industry has never been serious about security. We all download and run unvetted code via package managers every day. At least now the insanity is out in the open. We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes.

sunrunner 7mo ago
> We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes. And then we won't need to, because at that point it will be too late.
asdff 7mo ago
I keep getting so depressed thinking about the inevitable. Quite simply, humans can't scale or iteratively improve. We still need to eat, we still need to sleep, we can only think on one thread at a time basically, we take 20 years to get to our prime, which is a fleeting moment, while most of our lifespan is spent in a state of decline of capability. AI humanoid robot from the near future doesn't need to eat or sleep, can work 24/7, can compute thousands of processes in parallel, is the same fungible unit as any other humanoid robot, forever with some maintenance. Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world? It is more profitable for the company to have humans go extinct and maximize planetary resource use to its fullest extent possible. Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >and don't even realize it. Oh, many of us realize it, but doing anything about Moloch is much, much harder.
- nancyminusone 7mo ago
  To what end though? Are the robots going to take over and trade busy work amongst themselves forever? What would that accomplish?
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago

superb_dev 7mo ago

I’ve never had respect for the industry as a whole, only individuals within. There has a been a serious lack of rigor and professionalism in software engineering for as long as I’ve been a part of it

jihadjihad 7mo ago
It's a slap in the face that we tack engineering onto it. A very small percentage of software engineering is as rigorous as actual engineering.
- dgxyz 7mo ago
  As an actual engineer who moved into software "engineering", yes this. It kills me.
  - DANmode 7mo ago
    Top three things lacking? (In your personal opinion)
    - dgxyz 7mo ago
      Fads and fashion over strong, tested technology. Attitude that you can fix broken stuff later and customers are fine with it. Charlatans and fuckwits everywhere who wouldn't last a second in a traditional engineering discipline.
      - DANmode 7mo ago
        Checks out. and thank you!
- emptyfile 7mo ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I don't think that's the case in most of the non English speaking world. Mostly we're just called programmers.
- 7mo ago

edf13 7mo ago

It’s a nightmare… the problem is it’s far too easy for people to set these agents up - without understanding the security implications. We’ve covered so many issues already on our blog (grith.ai)

wnevets 7mo ago

The number of wasted hours spent talking about code quality and patterns has to be astronomical.

throwawaytea 7mo ago
Don't worry, ai read all the transcripts and blogs and emails and has at least ingested some of the ethos in its outputs. I self taught and wrote a small saas in 2017. Pays well enough to support me. I'm building a new one using AI this year. I promise you, it's better built and more secure than what my previous still in use Saas is.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

kstenerud 7mo ago

I think it's batshit crazy. That's why I wrote yoloAI, so I could sandbox it up properly and control EXACTLY what comes out of that sandbox, diff style. https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai I can't go back anymore. Going back to a non-sandboxed Claude feels like going back to a non-adblocked browser.

heisenbit 7mo ago

Agents are providing to employees the long overdue benefits limited liability companies long enjoyed: Gambling with upside for themselves and other peoples downsides.

nickpinkston 7mo ago
That's a fun insight. Have you / others written about this?
- moffkalast 7mo ago
  They technically have, just now.
- BoxFour 7mo ago
  “Heads I win, tails you lose” as a business concept has been written about quite a bit. “The Gervais Principle” is an oft-cited one.

piva00 7mo ago

We didn't collectively decided, we've got this forced down our throats to apply a novel tool to any imaginable situation because the execs got antsy about being left behind. A truly absurd amount of capital was deployed which triggered a cascade of reactions by the people in charge of capital at other places. They are extremely anxious that everything will change under their feet, and if they don't start using as much as humanly possible of it right about now they die. That's it. The tools have definitely found some use, there's more to learn on how else they can be used, and maybe over time smart people will settle on ways to wrangle it well. The messaging from the execs though, is not that, it is "you'll be measured on how much you use this, we don't know for what or how, it's for you to figure out but don't dare to not use it". I do understand their anxiety, their job is to not let their companies die, and make the most money as they can in the process; a seemingly major shift on the foundations of their orgs will cause fear. But we have not collectively decided that it was safe, and good, to run rampant with these tools without caring for all that was learnt since software was invented...

dgxyz 7mo ago
This wasn't really forced on us. The whole industry is like a fashion show and has been for a long time. This is just exceptionally stupid compared to moderately stupid things before. I see it ore that everyone's wearing pink feathered chicken suits because it's in fashion. If you don't wear a pink feathered chicken suit then you're a luddite scumbag who doesn't deserve the respect of your peers. However some of us still have enough self-respect not to be seen dead in a pink feathered chicken suit. I mean I'm still pissed off at half the other stuff we do in the industry. I haven't even really looked at the chicken suits yet.
- quantified 7mo ago
  Force is seeping in. Managements are expecting that LLM-driven prouctivity-enhancers will be deployed and give broad-based boosts. More are each week. Supposedly cheaper than people. Those that aren't yet might be soon. When your performance review includes facility with and productivity with LLM tools, you are being forced.
- 7mo ago

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

antonvs 7mo ago

The media isn’t helping. This wasn’t a “rogue AI”. It was a system that was given permission by a human operator. We don’t say “a rogue plane killed 300 people today when it crashed into a mountain”. The only difference in the AI case is that some people are attempting to shift blame for their incompetence into a computer system, and the media is going along with it because it increases clicks.

cassianoleal 7mo ago
> It was a system that was given permission by a human operator. From TFA: "But the agent also independently publicly replied to the question after analyzing it, without getting approval first."
- antonvs 7mo ago
  Again, these are systems that have been explicitly given the ability to perform these actions. Trying to claim that it was somehow the AI’s fault is sheer incompetence and/or self-serving deceptiveness. You can’t authorize a system to take some action and then complain when it takes that action. The “approval” you quoted is not a security constraint. Someone who confuses it for a security constraint is incompetent.
- Barrin92 7mo ago
  the ridiculous anthropomorphism is killing me. Software 'agents' can't ask for 'approval', they're not persons. That's like saying my script didn't ask me for approval to modify the system after I ran it with sudo privileges. The developer is solely responsible for what APIs they expose to a bot. No you can't say your software agent was grumpy and mean and had a bad day. It is not a human intern, it is an unreliable chatbot who someone ran with permissions it should not have had.

zzgo 7mo ago

> cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matter I saw the sea change in 2008 when quality process got replaced with velocity and testing tasks. I've watched everything from Experian and health record data leaks to Windows 11 since that change. Software quality hasn't mattered for a long time.

dr_kiszonka 7mo ago

I think it might be because we (or at least I) used to associate insecure actions with people, not computers. Computers should know better, right? Recently, I spotted that Opus 4.6 found config files for one of its tools and gave itself access to my whole filesystem. Similarly, Gemini CLI will rewrite itself if you let it.

suhputt 7mo ago

[dead]

lofaszvanitt 7mo ago

The whole agent ecosystem is a ridiculous shitshow. All of this because you need to ASAP find something believable to sell your overinflated, bullshit machine to the masses. Otherwise the bubble will burst.

mancerayder 7mo ago

There's nothing "collectively" about it. I don't know what industry you work in, but in mine it's a top down mandate to use AI everywhere, tracked with KPIs, from the CEO down, and supported and pressured by companies like Amazon and MS. We're the dummies that have to run around picking up dookies like a new puppy in the house.

brian_r_hall 7mo ago

The frustrating part is watching all the careful thinking about reliability and failure modes get thrown out the window the second something new gets hyped. It's not even that people disagree with the principles, they just stop applying them.

webagent255 7mo ago

[dead]