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Comment by tempfile | Hacker News Reader

I want to agree with you, but most software projects people work on are ridden with unknown bugs and people do in fact live with this. I'm not aware of any commercial software project that arrives at the goal "not having any bugs or unforeseen failures at all". And where this does happen (space probes?) it is very expensive.

IMO the issue with LLMs is they massively widen the "unknown unknowns" (skipping review makes this problem even worse). This is obviously much worse when an LLM is actually a part of the software rather than just producing software that is otherwise deterministic.

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I think OP was a little too absolute but i agree with the premise. People who engineer buildings and bridges are not allowed (generally) to ship mistakes. Software "engineers," though, have just accepted it as standard practice.

I do think the world would be better if commercial software had to meet some professional standard of fitness, with meaningful repercussions if not. I also realize that ship apparently sailed before i was born, and I'm not paid to do serious engineering, I'm paid to ship features.

(Not even saying I'm qualified to do the former anyway, i just also think every time national air traffic is shut down or like in France the other day and hundreds of supermarkets lose all their frozen inventory, or i can't do my job because some service failed, or yes, claude code is slow and heavy age can't work right in every terminal, that maybe we shouldn't be writing the stuff that the whole world relies on to function every day with zero agreed upon professional standards)

> I'm not aware of any commercial software project that arrives at the goal "not having any bugs or unforeseen failures at all".

It's ludicrous that we have executives at tech companies that think this is possible.

One S&P 500 company I worked for signed a big contract to deliver bugless software for an enterprise web portal for the state of Minnesota. I was on the team that had to make that magic happen. I had to leave the company not long after that due to nearly life-ending burnout.

So I would throw scorn at the ivory tower inhabitants here who should know better than to suggest that anything of substantial complexity can be bug free

Maybe the state of Minnesota should have paid more and your company shouldn't have bid what it did

Exactly! That's my point. It's already a problem, and it's not "fine" just because it's the status quo, but at least we can chalk it up to "humans are fallible". LLMs 100x the amount of mistakes a programmer can make in a day, and that's inexcusable to not take seriously, that's my point. We don't need to chase perfection, but we can't pretend like whatever Claude one-shots is any good at all.

LLM is clearly not 100xing the mistakes as we have witnessed Anthropic’s success. Otherwise the system would not have been functional. It’s not like their system is not tested.

The thread is about jankiness, lack of feature cohesion and code quality.

What we are discussing here is: is it acceptable to accept poor code quality and trade it off with delivery?

> What we are discussing here is: is it acceptable to accept poor code quality and trade it off with delivery?

I found that people that lean towards the latter also favor profits over customer satisfaction. Then they will try to defend themselves with a black and white view “it’s either this scrap or no delivery”.

> LLMs 100x the amount of mistakes a programmer can make in a day

1. Have you seen that? If so, which agent+model?

2. Is “per day” intentionally used instead of per implementation - i.e a coding agent may A) be far faster tok/s than a human, and B) work more hours per day, so it’s similar bug rate per implementation? Or did you mean bugs per implementation?

If you write 100x the amount of code, it contains 100x the amount of mistakes that you'd write if you wrote 1x the amount of code.

I haven't found that with LLMs - have you?

1. Are you referring to LLMs handling 100x as many patches as a human can, or that LLM implementations are 100x as long as a human's implementation?

2. In my experience, LLM implementations are often 2-4x as long, largely because they have a lot more error handling than I would have chosen to implement. However, I don't find they have correspondingly X times as many mistakes.

3. Part of how agents seem to avoid many mistakes or even catch mistakes is by testing things. For example, it caught issues in Pester functions on certain Pester versions, or will even analyze binaries to verify the right config settings to use, etc.

4. If you are seeing 100x as many bugs, which agent+model?

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