alt Hacker NewsThe problem is that people go on Twitter and see the posts from "thought leaders" and "influencers" who say things like "reading the code is not needed". Those people are not working on systems that have paying customers who would cancel their subscription - or worse - if the software became too defective or unreliable.
You only need a handful of occasions of creating massive billing errors for your customer's customers before they will slag you to all their CTO friends and pull the plug. Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week, and couldn't fix it after two months of thrashing because no one there has any understanding of how anything works anymore. They are simply done at that point, all the value of their brand lost.
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As if engineers, especially those writing software to handle financial transactions (which are usually in regulated businesses), don’t know how to write conformance tests with invariant cases.
The amount of trust AI has set on fire is incredible.
Business and people that I once though competent I trust no longer.
I'm watching leaders I thought had vision throw the future away for the shortest-term gains.
What have we become?
I mean, have you looked at Microsoft products since their inception? They still print money. Or Atlassian.
I don't see what the giant social cost of AI hucksters is supposed to be... who cares if some random influencers claim you can vibe code your entire existence? the thing that bothers you is that the grifters are basically right, just for the wrong reasons (and a bit too early). Comments like this imply that there is some cavalcade of situations like this that have caused actual harm to actual people, but it is actually just an emotional response to people who are personally distasteful, and borne out of a desire to make sure that the "assholes aren't proven right". stuff like "Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week" is just so silly... what about AI makes this more likely in any way whatsoever? If anything, AI would have such a subtle scheme for robbing us blind that it would defy characterization into pithy quotation marks. this feels like a complaint about humanity dressed up as a complaint about AI. for all we know, AI could actually improve the situation-- it's not like humanity has set some unimpeachable precedent.
> Those people are not working on systems that have paying customers who would cancel their subscription - or worse - if the software became too defective or unreliable.
That's just not true.