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by Paul-Craft 48 days ago
Are you willing to wake up at 3 AM when that "valuable" AI-written code pages on-call?

I agree there is some value in AI tools, but implementation details do matter. People shouldn't be pushing unread code to prod. That's how you end up with security holes and other bugs. That's how you end up dropping millions of orders on Amazon.com.

2 comments

I think the last ten+ years has taught us that massive security breaches are more of an insurance claim problem and some $4/mo credit monitoring payouts.

And major corporations certainly don’t seem to care that much about leaving massive amounts of money on the table from jr level tech issues. I see it all the time. I mentioned a few from Walmart, Meta, and Amazon recently.

Everyone talks like these things matter, but the results say everyone is just playing pretend.

Excuse me? Amazon lost more money in one day than most companies have in revenue, from dropped orders. I would say that matters. Believe it or not, the systems we work on do things that matter in the real world.
Seems to be an instance of the prevention paradox: Security (in general) is taken seriously enough that major incidences are low enough that people think that security does not matter that much.
I would too. I’m saying businesses don’t seem to. At least not like we assume.
The quality of our work is too subordinated to business leaderships who see the forms of technical insurance we build into software development processes as fat, and are fundamentally opposed to doing things right. Besides solidarity this is the major reason for tech workers to unionize. We won't because we don't have any sense.
People pushed unread and buggy code to production long before AI.