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Comment by reese_john | Hacker News Reader

  Why build each new airplane with the care and precision of a Rolls-Royce? In the early 1970s, Kelly Johnson and I [Ben Rich] had dinner in Los Angeles with the great Soviet aerodynamicist Alexander Tupolev, designer of their backfire Bear bomber. 'You Americans build airplanes like a Rolex watch,' he told us. 'Knock it off the night table and it stops ticking. We build airplanes like a cheap alarm clock. But knock it off the table and still it wakes you up.'...The Soviets, he explained, built brute-force machines that could withstand awful weather and primitive landing fields. Everything was ruthlessly sacrificed to cut costs, including pilot safety.
  We don't need to be ruthless to save costs, but why build the luxury model when the Chevy would do just as well? Build it right the first time, but don't build it to last forever. - Ben Rich in Skunk Works

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That's an interesting story, but not a great analogy for software.

If a technology to build airplanes quickly and cheaply existed and was made available to everyone, even to people with no aeronautical engineering experience, flying would be a much scarier ordeal than it already is.

There are good reasons for the strict safety and maintenance standards of the aviation industry. We've seen what can happen if they're not followed.

The fact that the software industry doesn't have similar guardrails is not something to celebrate. Unleashing technology that allows anyone to create software without understanding or even caring about good development practices and conventions is fundamentally a bad idea.

Soviet engineering wasn't sloppy. It was designed for robustness, loose tolerances and simplicity. It was well thought out design. In the same way that as much thought went into the cheap alarm clock than went into the Rolex watch, maybe even more so, the engineers just had different requirements.

It takes a lot of work to make cheap, low precision parts work together reliably. The Rolex has it easy, all the parts are precisely built at a great cost and everything fits perfectly. With the cheap alarm clock, you don't know what you will get, so you have to account for every possible defect, because you won't get anything better with your budget and the clock still needs to give you an idea about what time it is.

The parallel in software would be defensive programming, fault tolerance, etc... Ironically, that's common practices in critical software, and it is the most expensive kind of software to develop, the opposite of slop.

> Soviet engineering wasn't sloppy. It was designed for robustness, loose tolerances and simplicity

aka "fitting".

I wrote a blog on why Soviet-style engineering is bad https://blog.est.im/2026/stderr-04

There's a narrative that gets passed around in physics circles about how the Soviets were better at finding creative and analytical solutions than Americans, because of the relative scarcity of computing versus intellectual labour resources.

It would make sense to me that a parallel mechanism could apply to Soviet engineering. If material and technologically advanced capital are scarce, but engineers are abundant, you would naturally spend more time doing proper engineering, which means figuring out how to squeeze the most out of what you have available.

Let me highlight this part:

> Everything was ruthlessly sacrificed to cut costs, including pilot safety.

If we translate this analogy back to AI driven software development, what would be the equivalent of "pilot safety"?...

Be very careful who sources your pacemaker.

And then everyone disagrees what counts as luxury in software.

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