I am so over the presumptive blog post tone personally.

Maybe we can just not give it access to production databases ever?

Not picking on you, but AI maximalism has infected tech to the point where we talk about how to stop AI from deleting prod instead of seeing that giving AI access to prod is a foolish idea to begin with.

That is certainly true. Anyone who gives an LLM access to their systems is a fool who will soon find themselves out of a job.

I mean that it’s easy to be careful around a bandsaw because it’s clearly dangerous. The danger with LLMs is that they don’t seem overtly dangerous so you just go right ahead and throw your whole arm in there.

I don't know. The dangers of LLMs are quite well documented by now. It's definitely not a secret.

That clarifies it...thanks!

The most exasperating thing about the incident is how much of the media either tried to pin it on AI and/or Railway. The whole thing only took place because the guy FAFO’d by having AI work with prod directly.

Yet the narrative was mostly not about accountability for him. If I was a dumbass and deleted prod and wrote a post about it, nobody would care. Put an AI in there and all of the sudden it’s newsworthy. Ridiculous.

The takeaway here is to make this sort of scenario impossible in the future. It’s not hard to make that happen, but it might mean you need to manually interact with prod.

Anything else is just gambling.

Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.

The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)

It’s not surprising to me that the same crowd that cheers for the demise of software engineering skills invented its own notion of AI prompting skills.

Too bad they can veer sharply into cringe territory pretty fast: “as an accomplished Senior Principal Engineer at a FAANG with 22 years of experience, create a todo list app.” It’s like interactive fanfiction.

That's quite similar to the AI Studio's prompt. You are a world-class frontend engineer...

Odd, everyone was insisting this would "democratize" programming though.

Guess it democratizes it if you have money, huh?

Good old "one dollar, one vote" democracy!

These people have always existed. Hell, they are here, too. Now they have a new thing to delegate responsibility to.

And no, I don't understand them at all. Taking responsibility for something, improving it, and stewarding it into production is a fantastic feeling, and much better than reading the comment section. :)

I’m convinced the comment section hates multi-paradigm languages because you can misuse them. And it has features that may not be needed, which triggers this weird purist mentality of, “gee, it would be so much better if it didn’t have feature X.” But oftentimes that’s just pontification for its own sake, and they aren’t really interested in trying it out. Feature X remains something they won’t use, so it should go.

Yep, up there with ActiveRecord as the finest ORM I’ve ever used. What seals it for me is the low coupling it imposes on entities.