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I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security
by zmmmmm 5mo ago
I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery.
Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. It will become a special kind of process to clean room out such a mess and rebuild it fresh (probably still with AI) after distilling out core design principles to avoid catastrophic breakdown.
Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first, place but it will take us 20 years to learn them, just like original software eng took a lot longer than expected to reach a stable set of design principles (and people still argue about them!).
- uuyy 5mo agoAI janitors
- Brian_K_White 5mo agoIt's kind of like producing code is becoming more like farming. We didn't create the dna we rely on to produce food and lumber, we just set up the conditions and hope the process produces something we want instead of deleting all the bannannas. Farming is a fine an honorable and valuable function for society, but I have no interest in being a farmer. I build things, I don't plant seeds and pray to the gods and hope they grow into something I want.
- nradov 5mo agoPrayers are for weather. Pretty much all farmed plant, animal, and fungus species have been selectively bred or genetically modified. Farmers know what's going to grow.
- Brian_K_White 5mo agoFarming has merely a lot of study and input into the process, very little actual control and no determinism at all. We know how to improve chances is all. The fact that we breed and "engineer" is like a drop in the bucket.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoIt's pretty deterministic in that if you plant corn you will grow corn not beets, you know? If the farming situation were as dire as you seem to suggest, we'd have unpredictable famines all the time, but we don't
- Brian_K_White 5mo agoYou might grow corn, or you might grow defective unusable corn and/or any number of other things like locusts or fungi or other plants that decide to grow in the place where you planted corn. Sure, the corn seeds will not produce ball bearings. Genius observation. There are about an infinity of other things that can and do happen besides that. Planting is merely setting up the conditions. We didn't write the dna, we couldn't write the dna if we wanted to because we are an infinity away from understanding all the actual processes that descend from the dna. And when we utilize the dna that we simply found and didn't and couln't hope to write, it's always, at best, a case of hoping it goes right again this time.
- nradov 5mo agoTell me you've never done any farming without telling me you've never done any farming. There is certainly risk in the business due to market fluctuations, weather, natural disasters, disease, and pests. But the final product is highly deterministic. Almost all genetic variability has been expunged from major food production species in a relentless pursuit of predictable yield. Everything looks and tastes the same. We can debate whether that's a good thing but it is the reality for most farmers.
- Brian_K_White 5mo ago
- kibwen 5mo agoNot janitors. Hazmat cleanup crews.
- jcgrillo 5mo agoLike this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach%2C_Missouri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach%2C_Missouri Scrape off all the soil, put it in casks, and bury it in a concrete bunker for 10000 years. Then relocate everyone and attempt to rebuild.
- leoc 5mo ago> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)
- detritus 5mo agoThe origin of 'dark DNA' begins to make more sense through this sort of lens, except the system somehow maintained a level of compensation to fix all its flaws.
- elictronic 5mo agoWe do as well, it's called bankruptcy. Not every company survives but in the end the ones that do are more resilient.
- jimbokun 5mo agoHumans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.
- ttoinou 5mo agoHow do you explain to a junior this pile of messy code isn’t crap but is actually years of integrated knowledge ? That the most common principles discussed in computer science (OOP, SOLID, DRY etc.) are actually just little guides that aren’t to be taken to the extremes ?
- e9 5mo agoExpert knows when to break the rules
- blipvert 5mo agoReminds me of the quote in the original Westworld movie: “ These are highly complicated pieces of equipment… almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they’ve been designed by other computers. We don’t know exactly how they work.” Now how did that work out ;-)
- singlow 5mo agoHowever Michael Crichton imagined it would.
- blipvert 5mo agoI guess that “well” wouldn’t have sold many books.
- thaumasiotes 5mo agoThat depends. If this equipment is part of the plot, you're right. If it's part of the premise of the world, "well" would be the expectation.
- delichon 5mo agoShelve it with the Jurassic Park version where John Hammond builds a safe, profitable theme park, and The Andromeda Strain that gives people the sniffles.
- orev 5mo agoAs the models keep improving, wouldn’t you be able to task a newer AI to “clean up this mess”?
- aaron_m04 5mo agoHow could anyone answer that with any level of certainty?
- jeremyjh 5mo agoFrankly this is what everyone is counting on whether they know it or not. The question though is not “will the models get good enough?”. The question is does the repo even contain enough accurate information content to determine what the system is even supposed to be doing.
- hennell 5mo agoAi runs `rm -rf`
- dalmo3 5mo agoBeyond the Singularity, we reach the Nullarity.
- AussieWog93 5mo agohttps://youtu.be/m0b_D2JgZgY https://youtu.be/m0b_D2JgZgY
- malfist 5mo agoAre they improving? I thought they were just getting more expensive
- maplethorpe 5mo agoMythos apparently wrote a poem so beautiful it made Dario cry.
- jcgrillo 5mo ago
- ramoz 5mo agoA non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.
- jeremyjh 5mo agoWhat concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.
- jameshart 5mo agoI mean, the stories about how stuff was getting built in the late 90s/early 2000s aren’t much worse.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoOr you end up with a certification process, which will of course introduce it's own problems but startups doing things the right way and not just "moveing fast and breaking things" can thrive.
- pjc50 5mo agoOracle have routinely had multimillion pound contract failures and people keep buying from them. Big vendors are too big to fail.
- jcgrillo 5mo ago> Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first... It's really nowhere near as complicated as making distributed systems reliable. It's really quite simple: read a fucking book. Well, actually read a lot of books. And write a lot of software. And read a lot of software. And do your goddamn job, engineer. Be honest about what you know, what you know you don't know, and what you urgently need to find out next. There is no magic. Hard work is hard. If you don't like it get the fuck out of this profession and find a different one to ruin. We all need to get a hell of a lot more hostile and unwelcoming towards these lazy assholes.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- altairprime 5mo agoFinancial auditing with pre-AI technical chops will be uniquely niche-valuable, too :)
- fooker 5mo agoThis might not pan out to be the glorious victory of human craft as you’re imagining it to be. Here’s a slightly different future - these AI rescue consultants are bots too, just trained for this purpose. Plausible? I have already experienced claude 4.7 handle pretty complex refactors without issues. Scale and correctness aren’t even 1% of the issue it was last year. You just have to get the high level design right, or explicitly ask it critique your design before building it.
- malfist 5mo ago> You just have to get the high level design right, or explicitly ask it critique your design before building it. Do you think people are not giving their agents specs and asking for input?
- fooker 5mo agoVery often, no.
- literalAardvark 5mo agoThe ones who end up with messes, no
- djeastm 5mo agoMaybe the professional devs, but not the vibecoders
- vasco 5mo agoA thing I've noticed is that everyone thinks they prompt better than the next guy.
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo agoThis. I have this buddy, who is not an idiot by stretch of the imagination and more adventurous than me in some ways ( I don't really run agents on my machine ), but when I was looking at his prompts, I sometimes question how he gets anything done at all. It is vague and angry demands.
- jiggawatts 5mo ago> I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting I thought the same when I saw development outsourced to Indians that struggled to write a for loop. I was wrong. It turns out that customers will keep doubling down on mistakes until they’re out of funds, and then they’ll hire the cheapest consultants they can find to fix the mess with whatever spare change they can find under the couch cushions. Source: being called in with a one week time budget to fix a mess built up over years and millions of dollars.
- alhazrod 5mo agoThe complexity you would come to the rescue to solve, would that be from AI or from the style of programming you let the AI have? I mean, you have very different problems if you use functional style vs object-oriented. It is up to the programmer to realize they want a functional style and request that from the AI, as much as possible. Even AI cannot imagine every state transition, unless it is so smart that it should be the one telling you what to do.
- abhiyerra 5mo agoHeh. Got a customer recently around this. Entire infrastructure and CI/CD vibecoded. They half implemented Kubernetes in Github Actions that were several thousand lines long and impossible to understand. I think the problem will get worst. I dislike the marketing around AI, but I do think it is a useful tool to help those who have experience move faster. If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.
- ethbr1 5mo ago> If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do. I've been watching non-developers vibe code stuff, and the general failure mode seems to be ignorance of 3-pick-2 tradeoffs. They'll spam "make it more reliable" or some such, and AI will best-effort add more intermediary redis caches or similar patterns. But because the vibe coders don't actually know what a redis cache is or how it works, they'll never make the architectural trade-offs to truly fix things.
- danbolt 5mo agoI’ve noticed something similar with vibecoded game rendering logic submitted by peers. Sometimes it will be peppered with extraneous checks for nullptr, or early returns on textures that have zero size. I often wonder if it’s the statistical nature of the LLM mixed with a request in the prompt.
- suzzer99 5mo agoAI LOVES defensive coding. I asked you for code to filter and reduce an array. I didn't ask you for a method that makes sure the array exists and is an array before it does anything else.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hughw 5mo agoBut it's so easy now to redo it all ground up, and if models improve, do it better next time. I exaggerate only a little.
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoI'm with you on this one, having "vibe coded" some smaller internal tools on GPT 5, and then re-vibed it on Opus 4.6 and 5.5 -- they basically just fixed all of the problems without me doing much of anything other than prompting it to look at the existing code and make it "better".
- jimbokun 5mo agoHow much is your budget for tokens?
- djeastm 5mo agoAs long as it's under the budget for X number of senior software devs, it seems competitive.
- thefourthchime 5mo agoPretty much. We're intensely vibe coding something that has gone through so many requirement changes. The code has become very gnarly. I took a stab at basically one prompt rewrite of the whole thing. And it wasn't there, but it was 80% of the way there. and a hell of a lot cleaner.
- gerdesj 5mo ago"Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity" You have not seen the spreadsheets that accounts run the firm on. Bloody kids!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- whimsicalism 5mo agoI'm sure AI capabilities will plateau any moment now..
- Aperocky 5mo ago> reach a stable set of design principles Are you sure about this? Yes, there is a stable set, but they are used in all of the wrong places, particularly in places where they don't belong because juniors and now AIs can recite them and want to use them everywhere. That's not even discussing whether the stable set itself is correct or not - it's dubious at this point.
- hgs6 5mo agoHave you watched Jurassic Park? That story is not about Dinos.
- jimbokun 5mo agoThose design principles it will take us 20 years to learn are just the principles for writing good maintainable, debug-able, understandable code today. Will just take 20 years to figure out they still apply when AI writes the code, too.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoNo. You can use AI to code this way. I’ve successfully steered AI to implement good architecture by moving slowly and constantly course correcting
- jimbokun 5mo agoYes but most people won’t.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoMany teams did this before AI too. They start faster and end up with hard to refactor or extend code. For example, think of teams that don’t version their API /api/v1, that blocks a whole category of refactoring and extensions. Or teams that have random state transformation routes instead of following restful actions.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoWhy would it take 20 years to learn? People all around me, in an AI pilled company, have been saying this the whole time,
- jatora 5mo agoInteresting perspective. Fundamentally at conflict with the data, science, and 20+ year trends of AI coding systems - to the point of dogmatism. But interesting from a sociological point of view.
- m101 5mo agois this true because training companies have not been training AI for both performance and brevity (or some other metric like that)? If this becomes a much more serious issue surely they would adjust the training processes
- spamizbad 5mo agoWhat you're describing really isn't a new problem for organizations. Historically it's been a team of humans not using AI who gets over their skis and they have to have other more capable humans (also not using AI) to bail them out.
- m463 5mo ago> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand I think it will be needless verbose complexity. I kind of imagine someone having an unlimited budget of free amazon stuff shipped to their house. In theory, they are living a prosperous life of plenty. In reality, they will be drowning in something that isn't prosperity.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoI don't understand this point of view at all. There's a symmetry that is going entirely unappreciated by most of the comments in the thread: just as I can give Claude X,000 words of text to use to describe the code I want it to write, I can also give it some existing code and ask for X,000 words of text explaining what it does. (Call it, oh, I don't know, a "spec," maybe.) The explanation, in turn, can be fed back to recreate the functionality of the original code. At that point, why care about the code at all? If it works, it works. If it doesn't, tell the model to fix it. You did ask for tests, right? That is where we're indisputably headed. It's not quite a lossless loop yet, but those who say it won't or can't happen bear a heavy burden of proof.
- xstas1 5mo agoCode is not spec. There is an implementation spectrum. On one end, you have code that can perform only the behaviour explicitly declared in the spec, but has to be thrown away and rewritten for any new or updated spec. On the other end, you have code that implements or anticipates a wide range of future possible specs including the given one. The AI can operate on any point on this spectrum, but it's not very good at choosing. The more complex the software, the more such choices need to be made. When the number of bad choices reaches a certain critical mass, even a skilled engineer becomes powerless to undo all the bad choices, and even a powerful model becomes unable to reduce it back to a coherent spec.
- CamperBob2 5mo ago[flagged]
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand In their current forms, it's unlikely for a product that actually needs to work. It's not getting that complex and working with current LLMs.
- reverius42 5mo agoYeah, LLMs will have to advance a bit more to really create slop of great complexity.
- badtuple 5mo agoI've already done a handful of these gigs for early vibecoded products that had collapsed in on themselves. The scope of work was to stabilize the product and only make existing features work. The issues have all been structural, not local. It's easier to treat it like a rewrite using the original as a super detailed product spec. Working on the existing codebase works, but you have to aggressively modularize everything anyway to untangle it rather than attack it from the top down. All of these projects have gone well, but I haven't run into a case where a feature they thought was implemented isn't possible. That will happen eventually. It's honestly good, quick work as a contractor. But I do hope they invest in building expertise from that point rather than treating it like a stable base to continue vibecoding on.
- hattmall 5mo agoHow do you find this type of work??
- badtuple 5mo agoI've worked with many people over the years. A bunch of product people have struck out to make their own thing now that they can get a feedback loop going. I just keep in touch with people. They know my services are available, so if they have a need they reach out. The greatest asset in this type of work is genuinely liking people, being good at what you do, and keeping in touch. My email is easily findable for a reason.
- johnnyanmac 5mo agoSo, there is no secret sauce? Just work for people and have a hand at their contact info? The one part I do wonder is how to "keep in touch". Maybe it's a generational thing as a young millennial (some would call it "Zillenial") but the biggest issue in my networking over the year (cough and the dating scene cough) is ghosting. You think you hit it off, try to follow up the day after, and proceed to never again hear from them.
- luxuryballs 5mo agoThis is def true but I also wonder if AI models and context sizes and capabilities will scale to keep up and eventually be able to untangle the mess.
- dboreham 5mo agoMy current business plan!
- taurath 5mo agoWe already know them but everyone is busy throwing them in the trash. It’s all gas and no breaks or handling right now.
- andsoitis 5mo ago> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand But won’t those more complex systems presumably solve more complex problems than the systems that humans could build? Or within a comparable time? I think it is reasonably safe to assume at this point in the game that these AI systems are increasingly able to reason rigorously about novel problems presented to them, of ever increasing complexity and sophistication.
- CoderKatrina 5mo agoThat sounds so horrible, though. It's akin to people working as COBOL devs because someone has to do it, so they'll get the big bucks. Except I've never heard of anyone who actually likes COBOL and the more I've learned about how mainframe development actually works, the more horrified I've become haha. Dealing with an LLM spaghetti codebase sounds like hell.
- fractallyte 5mo agoThere's an LLM for that too... https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper
- thefourthchime 5mo agoMy company and my buddy's company, we're experiencing the same thing. We are trying to fire a SAAS vendor and it's become the hot new project. Now we to these meetings with 50 different people that are allegedly stakeholders, two or three product managers who have already vibcoded their version of something. Ultimately, if you want to move fast, it's better just to have one engineer vibe coding something. but, that engineer is under so much pressure. Now he's got a legacy mode and another legacy mode because the requirements keep changing. And now there's a deadline in four weeks. This all could work just fine, but the ungodly amount of attention that this world is getting puts too many cooks in the kitchen, which is always a recipe for disaster.
- xnx 5mo agoSounds like wishful thinking by a human programmer. Probably more likely tools will be rewritten from requirements or the old code will be refactored by newer models.