[chime]

> Would be ridiculously inefficient, while also being nondeterministic and opaque. Impossible to debug, verify, or test anything, and thus would be unwise to use for almost any kind of important task.

Not to defend a joke app, but I have worked in “serious” production systems that for all intents and purposes were impossible to recreate bugs in to debug. They took data from so many outside sources that the “state” of the software could not be easily replicated at a later time. Random microservice failures littered the logs and you could never tell if one of them was responsible for the final error.

Again, not saying GPT backend is better but I can definitely see use-cases where it could power DB search as a fall-through condition. Kind of like the standard 404 error - did you mean…?

[lelanthran]

> They took data from so many outside sources that the “state” of the software could not be easily replicated at a later time.

By definition, that's a complex system, and reproducing errors would be equally complex.

A GPT author would produce that for every system. Worse, you would not be able to reproduce bugs in the author itself.

While humans do have bugs that cause them to misunderstand the problem, at least humans are similar enough for us to look at their wrong code and say "Hah, he thought the foobar worked with all frobzes, but it doesn't work with bazzed-up frobzes at all".

IOW, we can point to the reason the bug was written in the first place. With GPT systems it's all opaque - there's no reason or rhyme for why it emitted code that tried to work on bazzed-up frobzes the second time, and not the first time, or why it alternates between the two seemingly randomly ...

[marcosdumay]

> They took data from so many outside sources that the “state” of the software could not be easily replicated at a later time.

Oh, I have fixed systems like those so that everything is deterministic and you can fake the state with a reasonably low amount of effort. It solved a few very important problems.

(But mine were data integration problems. For operations interdependence ones the common advice is to write a fucking lot of observability into it. My favorite minoritary one is "don't create it". I understand there are times you can do neither.)

[sublinear]

Wow I did not consider last ditch effort error handling, but that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for giving me something to think about!