[jcgrillo]

Reminds me of a codebase that was littered with SQL injection opportunities because doing it right would have been "premature optimization" since it was "just" a research spike and not customer facing. Guess what happened when it got promoted to a customer facing product?

[Shorel]

Now that's an stupid argument. I'm with you. Removing SQL injection has little if anything to do with performance, so it is not an optimization. I guess we will get more of this with the vibe coding craze.

[fragmede]

We'll see. It's easy enough to ask Claude to red team and attack the system given the codebase and see what holes it finds to patch up. It's good enough now to find blatantly obvious shit like an SQL injection.

[Quarrelsome]

tbf that's not their fault, as long as they were open about the flaws. Business should not have promoted it to a customer facing product. That's just org failure.

[jcgrillo]

I disagree. If you merge code to main you immediately lose all control over how it will be used later. You shouldn't ever ship something you're not comfortable with, or unprepared to stake your professional reputation on. To do so is profoundly unethical. In a functioning engineering culture individuals who behave that way would be personally legally liable for that decision. Real professions--doctors, engineers, etc.--have a coherent concept of malpractice, and the legal teeth to back it up. We need that for software too, if we're actually engineers.

[Quarrelsome]

Profoundly unethical? Ok so wtf is this formatting in your comment. You DARE comment, online where people can see, where you start a new sentence with two dashes "--". What are you thinking? Where's the professionalism? Imagine someone took that sentence and put it on the front of the biggest magazine in the world. You'd LOOK LIKE A FOOL.

OR, perhaps its the case that different contexts have different levels of effort. Running a spike can be an important way to promote new ideas across an org and show how things can be done differently. It can be a political tool that has positive impact, because there's a lot more to a business than simply writing good code. However if your org is horrible then it can backfire in the way that was described. Maybe business are too aggressive and trample on dev, maybe dev doesn't have a spine, maybe nobody spoke up about what a fucking disaster it was going to be, maybe they did and nobody listened. Those are all organisational issues akin to an exploitable code base but embedded into the org instead of the code.

These issues are not the direct fault of the spike, its the fault of the org, just like the idiot that took your poorly formatted comment and put it on the front page of Vogue.

[jcgrillo]

Grammatical errors, formatting mistakes, or bad writing in general aren't something the magazine publisher can be held liable for, it may be embarrassing but it's not illegal or unethical. Publishing outright falsehoods about someone is though--we call that defamation. Knowingly shipping a broken, insecure system isn't all that different. Of course the people who came along later and chucked it into prod without actually reviewing it were also negligent, but that doesn't render the first guy blameless.

[Quarrelsome]

If it was only supposed to be a spike then it does render the first guy somewhat blameless. Especially if the org was made aware of the issues, which I imagine they were if someone had raised the issue of the exploits in the code base.

I mean I could take a toddlers tricycle and try to take it onto the motorway. Can we blame the toy company for that? It has wheels, it goes forward, its basically a car, right? In the same way a spike is basically something we can ship right now.