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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

every time someone brings up "Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases" I like to point at that such code is not likely to be used for anything that matters

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Oh, but it is. I can have code that does something nice to have, needs not to be 100% correct etc. For example, I want a background for my playful webpage. Maybe a WebGL shader. It might not be exactly what I asked for, but I can have it in few minutes up and running. Or some non-critical internal tools - like scraper for lunch menus from restaurants around office. Or simple parking spot sharing app. Or any kind of prototypes which in some companies are being created all the time. There are so many use cases that are forgiving regarding correctness and are much more sensitive to development effort.

There is a cost burden to not being 100% correct when it comes to programming. You simply have chosen to ignore that burden, but it still exists for others. Whether it's for example a percent of your users now getting stalled pages due to the webgl shader, or your lunch scraper ddosing local restaurants. They aren't actually forgiving regarding correctness.

Which is fine for actual testing you're doing internally, since that cost burden is then remedied by you fixing those issues. However, no feature is as free as you're making it sound, not even the "nice to have" additions that seem so insignificant.

I never said it's free. (But also aiming for 100% correctness is very very expensive) I'm talking about trading correctness, readability, security and maybe others for another metrics. What I said is just not every project that has value should be optimized for the same metrics. Bank or medical software needs to be correct as close to 100% as possible. Some tool I'm creating for my team to simplify a process does not necessarily need to. I would not mind my webgl shader possibly causing problems to some users. It would get reported and fixed. Or not. It's my call what I would spend my effort on.

Of course the tradeoffs should be well considered. That's why it may get out of hand real bad if software will be created (or vibe coded) by people with little understanding of these metrics and tradeoffs. I'm absolutely not advocating for that.

I’m always amazed in these discussions how many people apparently have jobs doing a bunch of stuff that either doesn’t need to be correct or is simple enough that it doesn’t require any significant amount of external context.

In other words, people preaching LLMs are noobs with no real stake in what they are doing. But you can't really call people noobs these days.

Ha, a little harsher than I intended it to come off, but it really does make me wonder.

I'm always amazed by the arrogance that if you can't hack it, then everyone else can't either.

Yes, my arrogance amazes even me.

The point is more that everyone seems to acknowledge that a) output is spotty, and b) it’s difficult to provide enough context to work on anything that’s not fairly self-contained. And yet we also constantly have people saying that they’re using AI for some ridiculous percentage of their actual job output. So, I’m just curious how one reconciles those two things.

Either most people’s jobs consist of a lot more small, self-contained mini-projects than my jobs generally have, or people’s jobs are more accepting of incorrect output than I’m used to, or people are overstating their use of the tool.

Or something else!

Is such code hard to write in the first place?

Automating the easy 80% sounds useful, but in practice I'm not convinced that's all that helpful. Reading and putting together code you didn't write is hard enough to begin with.

It's not hard, but it's time consuming.

The things I'm wary of are pitfalls that are often only in the command/function docs. Kinda like rsync with how it handles terminating slashes at the end of the path. Which is why I always took a moment to read them.

You never write code to automate something in your personal environment, or to analyze some one-off data, rather than to actually go into production?

Not GP, but more often than not I reach out to tools I already know (sed,awk,python) or read the docs which don't take that much time if you know how to get to the sections you need.

While you're scanning through the docs, I'm already done and working on the next task.

I write code like that all the time. It's used for very specific use cases, only by myself or something I've also written. It's not exposed to random end users or inputs.

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