Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that it’ll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesn’t say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.
https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:
This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Merideth's The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering you'd be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what I've been following I don't know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then it's only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.
Also the fact that the framing here doesn't seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If you're not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?
I think part of the issue is that historical software quality was an artefact of its time… if you can’t easily patch your released products, you need to work harder to ensure they’re functional. If the only way for people to learn about how your product works in the documentation you ship with it, the docs need to be useful and comprehensive.
The combination of software needing no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and the internet rendered those pressures obsolete. Ship shit, fix later. Mass-scale a/b testing over past decade or two shows that most people seemingly don’t care if their software runs like absolute garbage, and is covered in adverts, and harvests all their personal data and the leaks all of it that wasn’t sold.
An incident-to-pr ratio that’s up by 250% is unfortunate, but it is not yet so bad that the end-users actually care enough to do anything about it, even assuming they can do anything.