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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let [devs] generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to [whatever].

Except, have you met startup devs? This is by and large the "move fast then unbreak things" approach.

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This is why working for startups gives me PTSD. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

The idea of inheriting a ChatGPT code base no one understands now makes it worse.

Just give it to GPT-5 for a refactor, easy!

It terrifies me that I have heard people say this unironically.

It’s the natural outcome of SV types denigrating the value of education.

Forget knowing anything, just come up with a nice pitch deck and let the LLM write the stack.

Not wholly surprised these people are YC backed. I’ve got the impression YC don’t place much weight on technical competence, assuming you can just hire the talent if you know how to sell.

Well, now replace “hire some talent” with “get a GPT subscription and YOLO”, and you get the foundation these companies of tomorrow are going to be built on.

Which hey, maybe that’s right and they know something I don’t.

It’s possible to move fast the same way, but break less things than this. For example, in this case, they said that they introduced tests to mitigate this. I can assure you that introducing tests takes more time than Google searches to check in like 2 minutes what each lines really does.

The idea of moving fast is to have extensive logs and alerts so you fix all error fasts while they appear without "wasting time" with long expensive tests in a phase where things change every day.

5 days to find out you have "duplicate key" errors in the db is the opposite of fast

For that matter, has OP even met the HN accepted wisdom? "No one knows what they're doing, everyone's faking it, it's fine if you are too" -- so don't take it as a red flag when your fumbling around keeps blowing up, because it surely must work that way everywhere else.

My early rant against this mentality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749

Its very humbling coming out of startup-land and working with big tech engineers and realizing their tooling runs circles around everybody else and enables them to be much more precise with their work and scale, though it isn't without trade-offs.

Yeah but a lot of that is just the accrual of improvements that is possible with a lot of resources over a long period of time.

People working in "big tech" aren't fundamentally better at building reliable tools and systems; the time and resource constraints are entirely different.

And the stakes! This outage might have cost the OP $10k. A similar snafu at a larger company might have cost tens of millions or more.

The big tech tooling probably cost tens of millions of dollars to create, and probably had a couple $10k mistakes on the way to getting it written and running.

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