Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by flessner 642 days ago
The ethos I have seen around these is usually "It doesn't have to be proper if it isn't making money"

I think it's a fair attitude if your only goal is to make money, but it completely misses "why" you should build something... if you truly care about a problem you wouldn't haphazard it anyway.

3 comments

> "It doesn't have to be proper if it isn't making money" > I think it's a fair attitude if your only goal is to make money

Is that why we often get so many posts about e.g. getting a huge bill on AWS or GCP? Or that so and so company shut them down or whatever else?

I've seen far too many "temporary" solutions and "quick fixes" that always go beyond the scope and lifetime. Never have such a mindset.

Maybe I don't truely care about my problem? But I just care a little bit, and I've done the risk analysis.

I used a whole lot of "ChatGPT just wrote it all for me" for a rust program that watches for and renames video game clips for me. Maybe it's insecure or has subtle bugs, I don't really care all that much because it does the job for me.

> Maybe I don't truely care about my problem?

You pretend to not care until you do. When it accidentally deletes your files or even your whole hard drive you'll suddenly find someone / something to blame.

> I think it's a fair attitude if your only goal is to make money

Short term, yes. But it's a bit short sighted as most of the AI code I have seen has security and scalability issues that long term have potential to blow up in your face costing even more money.

Granted that can usually be fixed by better prompts. But to right those prompts requires the person doing the "prompt engineering" (rolls eyes) to actually have a working knowledge of a lot of areas such as architecture, security, software engineering best practices, etc. And a lot of the influencers out there pushing AI openly admit to "not knowing how to code" let alone knowing the right way to build a technology product so that it scales and is safe.