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Software Engineering at the Tipping Point
- lenerdenator 5mo ago"Learn to use systems thinking to understand how developer ecosystems guide the evolution of your software systems. Improve your intuition for the systemic impacts of AI-driven software development and understand how you can better prepare for the exciting changes coming to our industry." This reads like a bunch of marketing speak that says nothing.
- oytis 5mo agoThe main content is the video. Not sure if it's any good
- dgellow 5mo agoI watched it just to be able to comment here. The whole presentation feels AI generated. The diagrams look 100% AI generated. The text is pretty generic, I really don’t know what insights you’re expected to get from this. I generally dislike HN cynical tone but I don’t see how not becoming a cynic myself when that’s the quality of presentation from a Principal Engineer on Google IO stage. Even at 2x speed that felt not worth the time
- serial_dev 5mo agoThen it’s a perfect embodiment of the AI era. You’ll read the slop and you’ll like it!
- ares623 5mo agoThanks for taking one for the team. I flagged this post since AI slop is not allowed.
- lelanthran 5mo agoIt is indeed at a tipping point; we are going from engineered deliverables to throwing stuff at the wall and keeping what sticks. I wonder if the public appetite for the inevitable quality crash is there, though.
- bdangubic 5mo agothe public is so used to good quality software that they are in for rude awakening :)
- dwattttt 5mo agoAnd yet, quality can always get worse.
- bdangubic 5mo agoit could and likely will but it’ll be in the news for a day tops and the world will move on to the “next thing.”
- lelanthran 5mo agoThe thing is, people already have certain expectations from their software, because it is all around them. They'd revolt en-masse if their TV had the downtime of github, of if their computer had the number of successful supply chain attacks that npm enjoys. The quality may not have been good, but the market had stabilised on what the public would accept. AI changes this substantially.
- bdangubic 5mo agoit absolutely doesn’t. most software is shitty and buggy. I know, have seen 30 years worth of it. just now we can write the shitty and buggy a lot faster. ask anyone that has been in the industry for awhile and they will tell you the same thing. a lot of crowd on HN write as if human-written code is any good and while there are always exception, on average, most software is shitty. if I had a dollar for every time I met someone writing software for “X” saying “dude, if you knew what I know you’d never use/do/… X” I’d be a very rich man
- rvz 5mo agoSomeone has to clean up the slop and explain why their product got more outages than before. Reputation and responsibility cannot be vibe-coded. Case in point: GitHub.
- sys_64738 5mo agoWe're janitors at best and I don't mean to disrespect janitorial who do real and very important work. Fixing AI slop doesn't feel real.
- m0llusk 5mo agoNot even janitors. Messy toilet clogs may demand immediate attention. Software sanitation is relatively low in priority.
- ares623 5mo agoTo continue with the janitor analogy, AI slop is like some drunk person intentionally smearing shit all over the bathroom walls and ceiling because it felt good at the time. They didn't have to do that, but they did and now someone else has to clean it up.
- ares623 5mo agoI can't help but feel that this (not this specific article but the whole trend) is a little bit misguided. Nothing has fundamentally changed in engineering? We aren't committing raw markdown files in Github and having Jenkins re-inference entire systems at each push. The new AI tools still deal with the underlying mess and at some points the abstraction will leak. It feels like Kubernetes? Yes, it allowed more complex setups but a decade later the leaky abstractions have become apparent and there are constant tradeoffs to be made with the problems it brings vs the problem it solves. But the awkward point is why was Kubernetes not a trillion dollar unicorn if it unlocked so much productivity gains?
- OptionOfT 5mo agoI'm sick of the people, these so called builders, how they are parasitizing on the time of the actual engineers to get their PRs into the codebase. People who have never coded, for who we now need to spend an insane amount of time validating their design, asking questions they don't even have the answers to, figuring out if the code written was needed for the prompt or whether it was just thrown in there because ... the AI had it as part of the tokens. Remember, their design isn't built from the ground up, it's focussed on the outcomes, like the movie Bedazzled. And then you spend time validating their code, you give them review feedback, instead of internalizing it they just shove it into the AI and let it fix it, meaning they don't learn. Next PR will have the same issues.
- jmercouris 5mo agoSounds exactly like my experience.
- happytoexplain 5mo agoWelcome to the life of enterprise developers forced to work with dirt-cheap contractors. Thanks to LLMs, this is now how all software development works.
- nvme0n1p1 5mo agoThe page is blank. Uncaught TypeError: can't access property "parentElement", t is undefined i https://io.google/2026/explore/workshop-2:29 <anonymous> https://io.google/2026/explore/workshop-2:29 <anonymous> https://io.google/2026/explore/workshop-2:29 Evidently the title is correct: we're beyond the tipping point of software quality.
- dgellow 5mo agoYou might have an adblocker or something blocking some JS. Its loading fine on my iPad