LatencyKills

I own a exotic car for the same reason I own mechanical watches. I love the engineering and craftsmanship. (But yes, I had several Lamborghini posters growing up) ;-)

That is exactly what happened in this case; the readme was the PRD.

Throughout the document Claude kept claiming that issues were "mitigated but not fixed". They were essentially bandaid fixes for things it couldn't figure out. When I pointed this out to the author he said, "Well Claude thinks it works."

I wonder what happens to software when enough people try to ship projects like this.

I was just trying to help a vibe coder and immediately noticed that their README.md was over 2,000 lines long. I asked, "Why is your readme so long?" and their response was, "This is just a really complicated application."

The app essentially manages a bunch of TODO items written in markdown.

I can't even begin to tell you how lucky I felt at the time. I loved the work and the people.

> He's telling stories from the past either way.

I'm sorry but why would that bother you? Is my experience not valid any longer?

My point was: it is not at all surprising that a lvl 70 was poking through active support tickets because many of us did the same thing. I retired at Chen's level btw.

I don't know how Chen discovered this issue of course but it could have been exactly how I described it.

I'm sorry, but that is kind of hilarious. I was lucky that I rarely had to deal with people like that. Most of the time is was low-level C folks who had found a real bug in one of the tools, compilers, etc.

Right... but my point was that even distinguished engineers at MS (lvl 70+) go "ticket diving" from time to time. It was somewhat contentious because juniors complained that all the "fun" tickets were taken by seniors.

I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Chen was browsing through open tickets, found this one, and grabbed it.

> You never knew this world either.

One of the reasons the world is so fucked up is because people have lost respect for expertise. I was on the original Visual Studio team at Microsoft and helped rebuild Xcode from scratch at Apple. I have 30 years worth of experience building low-level software and that experience matters.

If we were talking about cancer treatments and someone said, "Hey, I've been an oncologist for three decades" it would be ridiculous to not at least listen to what what they had to say.

Experience and expertise matters; now more than ever.

Lastly, why create a new account just to make that comment?

I'm not pro-AI (at least not the way the SOTA model companies operate) but I'm tired of seeing "written by AI" on every single thing on HN.

I get "wRiTteN bY aI!" comments on my open source projects when, in fact, I didn't use AI at all. I've considered sharing some of my recent reverse engineering work on HN but am confident that it would devolve into "it must have been written by AI" bs.

Is it important to know if something was created with AI? Yes. But spewing "written by AI!" without reading/evaluating something yourself is just as lazy.

The new generation of engineers will never know a world where all software was written by humans. As someone who spent 22 years writing assembly and low-level C/C++, I think that's a shame. But that is the new reality.

The irony of using AI to determine if something was written by AI.

> and anyone who think they may be is delusional

My entire point was that vulnerable (i.e, delusional, psychotic, bipolar, children) cannot always make rational decisions.

China has already banned any LLM from giving any type of medical/psychiatric advice because an LLM company has absolutely no right to allow their product to give out that type of advice.

OpenAI can't even contain its internal models and idiots believe that these companies can do whatever they like.

Read the damn link I shared. People are dying and murdering others because of the advice of LLMs. Children are becoming attached to LLM "friends" because they don't understand what it really is. Hell, most parents I know still don't fully understand the dangers of these models.

If an LLM simply replied, "I'm sorry, I cannot give guidance on that topic" people would still be alive today.

It is amazing to me that people like you understand that LLMs shouldn't be telling people how to make a bomb, but it is totally fine if it tells some who is suicidal to kill themselves.

LLMs can be used for good. Giving bad advice to vulnerable people is NOT good.

/ignored

If a doctor told a patient their delusions were real and that they should kill themselves or family members, that doctor would be disbarred and face a prison sentence.

That is what is going on here; not the ancient “hammer/gun” defense.

SOTA LLMs are giving both medical and psychological advice they have absolutely no authority to give. If you or I convinced someone to kill themselves, we’d face a prison sentence. [0]

Hammer companies aren't both selling you the hammer and then literally telling you to harm someone with it.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/12/693807708/woman-who-provoked-...

Why create an account just to make this comment?

> No one is dying from a glorified knowledge base that can do auto correct amazingly well.

All kinds of vulnerable people are dying due to LLMs. [0]

If SOTA LLM companies can benefit from the "intelligence", then they should also be liable for the harm caused.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots

Bias? Trump is literally using taxpayer funds for his propaganda ads. And now we have Trump TV.

If you believe this move is about making things easier I feel that America is doomed.

I mention my background because it is relevant context: I spent nearly 30 years building software used by billions of people. If you use Windows or macOS, you have likely used code I helped ship. I’m not going to apologize for that experience or pretend it does not inform my judgment.

Some engineering problems (such as designing a performant thread-quantum algorithm) require depth accumulated over years of working on real systems at scale. That is not elitism; it is simply how specialized expertise works. Experience is unevenly distributed, and that matters when evaluating technical claims.

When I say I trust LLM generated code, I mean that in a qualified, engineering sense. I do not treat an LLM as a slot machine: enter a prompt, paste the output, and hope. I use a deliberate workflow for decomposition, prompting, review, testing, validation, and integration. Developing that workflow took substantial time and experimentation.

The useful question is not “Can an LLM write code without oversight?” It obviously cannot, at least not reliably for nontrivial work. The question is whether an experienced engineer can build a process that makes LLM output trustworthy enough for particular classes of work. In my experience, the answer is yes. But the process, judgment, and willingness to do the work are the hard parts.

What in the world are you talking about? I was literally an senior engineer on the Windows Kernel team, the Visual Studio team, and the Xcode team at Apple.

This application, named Seymore, is being evaluated for purchase by several tech companies. (It helps having good industry contacts)

There was a ton of interesting engineering required to make this work at 60 fps+ without resorting to hacks or using private APIs. Most macOS engineers wouldn't even know where to start.

I've shipped code that is used by billions of people and all you just did was spew a bunch of bullshit. As someone who has built their own LLM from scratch, I have an extremely good idea of what they can and can't do.

If you don't know how to use these tools, you'll end up with crap. If you DO know how to use them, they are incredibly useful.

I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows.

The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have.

The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA

It's short for "fucking".

I spent 22 years as an engineer split between MS and Apple. SOTA LLMs can write code just as good as most human engineers. I expect to see the "LLMs are just next token predictors!" crap on Reddit... not HN.

I hate seeing comments like this on HN. We used to upvote “look at this crazy thing I did” work. Not everything has to make sense or be ground breaking.

It is cool that they got it to work at all.

What would I have done? The same thing most tech CEOs did - NOT give a trophy to the fascist whose seen his net worth increase by over $3B in single year while in office. Apple would have been just fine financially. Value should come from the core company principles; not groveling in front of a politician.

Cook embarrassed himself and every Apple employee by doing what Volkswagen did with the Nazis. That is what Cook will be remembered for.

Sigh... I spent over a decade at Apple. Tim was given a very long leash. So no, I don't think Ternus will give Trump a gold "You're a good boy!" trophy. As I said, that was probably one of the most embarrassing things an Apple employee has ever done. Most of the people I know who are still at Apple despise Tim.

Also, you might want to do a little research on the current board members.

As someone who spent half their career at Apple, I can't even begin to tell you how ridiculous that sentiment is. You won't find Apple employees who agree with you. It was infinitely embarrassing to see Tim bend over for a fascist asshole. Apple is now in the "bowed to Trump" group.

I will be glad when the Tim Cook era is over for good.

I spent 11 years at Apple and attended many meetings with SJ. It was amazing to see how quickly he could understand a problem while, at the same time, being brutally harsh about why it hadn't already been solved. No one but Steve would have been allowed to consistently act that way towards coworkers.

Steve showed a generation of CEOs that being an asshole was a viable strategy.

I'll help you out: all CS students are required to take an entry-level OS course. Again, you are making incredibly weak arguments given that most students are required to take an English writing course but then can't remember most of it.

It isn't that they didn't learn it: the issue is that most CS students graduate and work in areas that require zero OS knowledge. For example, when would I spin up a thread versus a fiber? Even ring-3 devs need to have some level of understanding if they want to create performant software.

First, I didn't work with the right universities. Now the students I work with "didn't pay attention".

/ignored

> you chose the wrong students at the wrong universities

I work with Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and Carnegie Mellon.

You don't know that "young engineers" are buying those books. I didn't claim that no one is interested in low-level development. My point is that most younger developers couldn't explain the difference between a mutex and a critical section, or how the OS handles a thread quantum, if their lives depended on it.

I could list a dozen new books on how to build an LLM from scratch. That doesn't mean that most developers understand LLM internals.

As an aside, I love your username. I have a tattoo of Aleph One. ;-)

> I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.

Really? Understanding the cost of ring transitions is incredibly useful. I recently consulted with a company that was having horrible performance issues, and it came down to the fact that the primary developer didn't know that certain Win32 calls forced ring transitions. The entire fix was switching from a mutex to a critical section (one causes a ring transition, the other doesn't).

Treating the OS like an impenetrable black box will bite upcoming engineers/companies... eventually.

I was a dev on the Visual Studio and Windows teams in the 90s. I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities.

I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger.

I’m not being critical; they are just focused on higher level abstractions.

> 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [0]

Trump has been openly anti-education since the 1990s. My favorite Trump quote: “I love the poorly educated.”

[0]: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...