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everforward • yesterday at 11:06 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

I agree with you, but it's a moot point for software engineering.

> Your concerns have moved up the stack to managing requirements, context, and verification processes.

This has always been the concern. "Add oauth to this app, there are no requirements beyond oauth working" has been an intern level task for ages. What makes software engineering hard is when the requirements start adding "well it has to use this oauth backend that isn't technically spec compliant, and the user is going to send some kind of random token you need to translate to oauth, and...". The problem isn't in writing code that will do the thing, it's figuring out exactly how that backend isn't oauth compliant and what chain of API calls I have to make to convert their random token into an oauth one, and etc.

Producing software that complies with a test suite isn't really novel. You've been able to outsource that forever. This falls apart in the same places outsourcing does; I'm sure India/Phillipines/etc/ is more than capable of iterating on code until it passes a test suite.