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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

Why? You own the pager, I assume. You own the mental hit when something you let go live (especially with your name on the PR) leaks customer data or deleted someone’s work.

And if you’re not reading your own work, is someone else during the PR? Are you reading other people’s PRs?

How do you know what your product does and how it does it?

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From what I understand for most people it isn't a conscious choice, it happens slowly over time. People naturally don't want to waste time, the code is there and if you don't look too closely it works, so they start skimming instead of going in-depth, expecting anything majorly wrong to pop out. But those things probably won't because generated code is very good at looking extremely high quality at a surface level no matter how bad it actually is. So eventually even the skimming starts feeling like a waste of time so it tapers off too.

When the combustion engine was invented, and we got the means by which we could accelerate our trip by 10x, and at the same time scale it to multiple people, we didn't tell the humans to keep pushing the vehicles by their hands, didn't we?

As a developer you are more akin to a car mechanic, who’s still expected to know how the engine works even a century after it was invented, rather than a driver, who is just the user in this parallel.

Mechanics I've been to generally have no idea about how things actually in the car work - from what I could understand, area is full of recurring problems, and this exactly benefits mechanics to solve them through trial and error approach rather than understanding much how underlying things work. Pretty much close to what I would say SWE will turn into, there's no other choice IMO in foreseeable future.

I think you underestimate the skill of more experienced mechanics. Tractor (as in 18 wheeler) and master mechanics tend to know what’s going on under the hood in detail.

Like what exactly?

I’m sure there are many of those, but like everything, there are tiers. I’m sure we’ll get something similar in SWE, but my hope is that you’ll still be able to choose to be a high tier engineer if you wanted to

Speed doesn't mean anything if you end up driving off a cliff.

Evidence so far does not suggest people driving off a cliff so while a valid concern it's not a likely one. We also acknowledged that the benefit of using a vehicle is such that it outnumbers the risks it may introduce. We never said there will be no risks attached.

We’ve only been on this train for 3-4 years, and in that period, we’ve already invented terms for this kind of vibe-coded, highly-breakable crud. We’ve also had a few, relatively high-profile in their spheres bugs come out and hurt people’s real, lived experiences.

And that’s just the stuff where the house of cards failed quickly.

Software by definition has always been and will remain broken in one or another way. AI makes no difference or whatsoever. Arguably, it will help raising the quality of software.

No, but the US and UK did enact Red Flag laws.

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