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Comment by StrLght | Hacker News Reader

Coding may have been solved, but uptime remains a mystery.

You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.

Oh no, you can pretty obviously just keep pushing out slop that only half works. Your customers will grumble and eat it like the peons your C suite thinks they are.

For whatever reasons, customers just buy trash nowadays, put up with trash, ignore horrifying contract terms, buy more trash, grumble about the trash, and then invest more in the trash.

It will be the death of us.

I've used some engineering programs that were appalingly buggy for any application, never mind how much they cost - but once you managed to fight through the bugs, they did the thing they were supposed to reliably, and you could trust the results.

This is not true for vibecoded stuff.

Unfortunately, not a mystery; it's management. As a syseng I can build you a 100% reliable system. But it'll fall to pieces when "Management" takes away our power to require change control, quality control, guardrails, rollbacks, performance testing, system limits, least privilege, etc. Any time you see a big company go down, it's because nobody was willing to enforce what's needed for reliability.

May I steal this quote as if it's mine? :bow:

You are trained now, it must be yours

Excuse me but you've distilled this comment from me

It's on the internet now, inside the bellies of 1000 llms.

It's everyones.

Why do you need to say it's yours to use it? :p

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