Until that slop that works leads to therac-26 or PostOfficeScandal2 electric boogaloo. Neither of those applications required software superior to their competitors, just working software
The average quality of software can only trend down so far before real world problems start manifesting, even outside of businesses with a hard requirement on "software superiority"
It's so bizarre to me seeing these comments as a professional software engineer. Like, you do realize that at least 80% of the code written in large companies like Microsoft, Amazon, etc was slop long before AI was ever invented right?
The stuff you get to see in open source, papers, academia- that's a very small curated 1% of the actual glue code written by an overworked engineer at 1am that holds literally everything together.
Why is it bizarre? I’m a tester with 38 years in the business. I’ve seen pretty much every kind of project and technology.
I was testing at Microsoft on the week that Windows 2000 shipped, showing them that Photoshop can completely freeze Windows (which is bad, and something they needed to know about).
The creed of a tester begins with faith in existence of trouble. This does not mean we believe anything is perfectible— it means we think it is necessary to be vigilant.
AI commits errors in a way and to a degree that should alarm any reasonable engineer. But more to the point: it tends to alienate engineers from their work so that they are less able to behave responsibly. I think testing is more important than ever, because AI is a Gatling gun of risk.
A single cloudflare durable object (sqlite db + serverless compute + cron triggers) would be enough to run this project. DOs have been added to CFs free tier recently - you could probably run a couple hundred (maybe thousands) instances of Stevens without paying a cent, aside from Claude costs ofc
Hard real time (or just "real time" in firmware/hardware contexts) is effectively a term of art. One that's been increasingly watered down by the rest of the industry.
Strict definitions matter when system failure == pacemaker missing a beat or train signalling system drives a freight train into the back of 400 passengers.
In game development we still care about the distinction between soft and hard realtime. Almost all games are soft realtime, even if the gameplay itself is turned based as we're processing user input, updating UI, animating things and so on.
And now you've pulled in a full sql parser as a dependency (admittedly a dev/build time dependency, but a dependency nonetheless) in a project that has no business parsing sql.
In this day and age of increasingly rampant supply chain attacks & dependency vulnerabilities, I'd definitely be second guessing the approach of "just write a test for it" if that test involved blowing up your attack/vuln surface
Until that slop that works leads to therac-26 or PostOfficeScandal2 electric boogaloo. Neither of those applications required software superior to their competitors, just working software
The average quality of software can only trend down so far before real world problems start manifesting, even outside of businesses with a hard requirement on "software superiority"