For all the whinging about bugs and errors around here the software industry in general (some niche sub-fields excepted) long ago decided 80% is good enough to ship and we will figure the rest out later. This entire site is based on startup culture which largely prided itself on MVP moonshots.
Plus plenty of places are perfectly fine with tech dept and the AI fire hose is effectively tech debt on steroids but while it creates it at scale it can also help in understanding it.
It is is own panacea in a way.
I think it is gonna be a while before the industry figures out how to handle this better so might as well just ride the wave and not worry too much about it in software.
Still software is not medicine even if software is required in basically every industry now. It should more conservative and wait till things settle down before jumping in.
> long ago decided 80% is good enough to ship and we will figure the rest out later
Sure, we can eat that 80% if we made the debt and know where the bodies are buried. When AI does it, it’s more like “50% is good enough and hopefully someone smart enough can fix it up to 60% when it breaks”, which inevitably means we get it to 55%.
> while it creates it at scale it can also help in understanding it.
This feels like cope, and I’m not trying to be snarky. I also know that I had to train my brain to skip google’s “AI Summary” on searches because I’ve had a handful of wrong answers from it - not technically correct, not correct with caveats, just flat out wrong. So sure, AI could make a bigger mess and then we could trust it to help sort it out, but even if it finds three real problems and one non-existent one, it has still made even more work to sort out.
> Still software is not medicine even if software is required in basically every industry now. It should more conservative and wait till things settle down before jumping in.
Agree. We had a big company meeting about becoming an AI-focused company (we do healthcare-related software) and I’m honestly a little worried - I don’t use any AI in my work, and when I asked a colleague who implemented our new build process for help with migrating my own repo they said “I don’t know, I asked GPT to do it”. And that’s why the pipeline has a mega-long ternary for the name which doesn’t resolve, so all of our runs are titled “if [[ $matrixType === …” but they’re using AI, and they’re going to be celebrated for it
It's funny how the assumption is always that LLMs are very useful in an industry other than your own.