whynotminot

This is a fading but common sentiment on hacker news.

There’s a lot of engineers who will refuse to wake up to the revolution happening in front of them.

I get it. The denialism is a deeply human response.

The real value that AI provides is the speed at which it works, and its almost human-like ability to “get it” and reasonably handle ambiguity. Almost like tasking a fellow engineer. That’s the value.

By the time you do everything outlined here you’ve basically recreated waterfall and lost all speed advantage. Might as well write the code yourself and just use AI as first-pass peer review on the code you’ve written.

A lot of the things the writer points out also feel like safeguards against the pitfalls of older models.

I do agree with their 12th point. The smaller your task the easier to verify that the model hasn’t lost the plot. It’s better to go fast with smaller updates that can be validated, and the combination of those small updates gives you your final result. That is still agile without going full “specifications document” waterfall.

Did you do diffs to confirm the code as stolen or are you just speculating.

> Solution, use both as needed!

This is the way. People are unfortunately starting to divide themselves into camps on this — it’s human nature we’re tribal - but we should try to avoid turning this into a Yankees Redsox.

Both companies are producing incredible models and I’m glad they have strengths because if you use them both where appropriate it means you have more coverage for important work.

Frankly I really don’t care about both sides-ism anymore. I can agree with you that a lot of administrations have been irresponsible on this point while also believing that the current administration is particularly dangerous in this area.

If I lose you here because of “needless tribalism” oh well.

I didn’t say he was the first to abuse powers. Indeed it’s kind of silly to even have to clarify “but other administrations…” because that’s fairly obvious to anyone old enough to have seen more than one president.

But the article is literally referencing the Trump administration seizing a reporter’s phone so the current administration’s overreach seems relevant here.

This article is about the Trump admin seizing a reporter’s phone. The politics was here from the start.

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy

“Arbitrary” meaning you better have good reasons! Which implies there are or can be good reasons for which your privacy can be violated.

You’re misreading that to mean your privacy is absolute by UN law.

Who decided absolute privacy in all circumstances is a fundamental human right? I don’t think any government endorses that position. I don’t know what international law you speak of. You’re basing your argument on an axiom that I don’t think everyone would agree with.

This sounds like a Tim Cook aphorism (right before he hands the iCloud keys to the CCP) — not anything with any real legal basis.

I get so annoyed by this Socratic line of questioning because it’s extremely obvious.

Terrorist has plans and contacts on laptop/phone. Society has a very reasonable interest in that information.

But of course there is the rational counter argument of “the government designates who is a terrorist”, and the Trump admin has gleefully flouted norms around that designation endangering rule of law.

So all of us are adults here and we understand this is complicated. People have a vested interest in privacy protections. Society and government often have reasonable interest in going after bad guys.

Mediating this clear tension is what makes this so hard and silly lines of questioning like this try to pretend it’s simple.

Seems like a solvable problem: make it clear on the app/interior car screens that a school zone is being avoided — I think most riders will understand this.

You also have to drive much more slowly in a school zone than you do on other routes, so depending on the detour, it may not even be that much longer of a drive.

At worst, maybe Waymo eats the cost difference involved in choosing a more expensive route. This certainly hits the bottom line, but there’s certainly also a business and reputational cost from “child hit by Waymo in school zone” in the headlines.

Again, this all seems very solvable.

I would wager the main reason for this is the same reason it’s also hard to teach these skills to people: there’s not a lot of high quality training for distributed debugging of complex production issues. Competence comes from years of experience fighting fires.

Very few people start their careers as SREs, it’s generally something they migrate into after enjoying it and showing aptitude for it.

With that said, I wouldn’t expect this wall to hold up for too long. There has been a lot of low hanging fruit teaching models how to code. When that is saturated, the frontier companies will likely turn their attention to honing training environments for SRE style debug.

It might not be possible for a lot of places — I don’t really know.

But I know when I drive, if it’s a route I’m familiar with, I’ll personally avoid school zones for this very reason: higher risk of catastrophe. But also it’s annoying to have to slow down so much.

Maybe this personal decision doesn’t really scale to all situations, but I’m surprised Waymo doesn’t attempt this. (Maybe they do and in this specific scenario it just wasn’t feasible)

I’m actually pretty surprised Waymo as a general rule doesn’t completely avoid driving in school zones unless absolutely unavoidable.

Any accident is bad. But accidents involving children are especially bad.

I think it’s designed around that easily replaceable and very commonly found battery.

Which is an appreciated and surprisingly un-Apple move. Despite some physical limitations this imposes, I applaud it.

Yes? That’s what I said.

I don’t know what the solution is, because a fourth branch of government also could be problematic. But it’s becoming a very obvious problem that the justice department is not separate from the executive.

I think you're kind of (completely) missing my point. Who signs two year leases at a motel?

Obviously someone with a kid enrolled in school and locked into a long-term lease is not transient and has a comparable amount of skin in the game as a homeowner.

Most places I know of let you vote if you have that kind of persistent record of living somewhere. I don’t know your specific situation.

Sure but there’s degrees to this. If you’re a day laborer renting a room at the local motel, it’s a lot easier for you to say “screw this place I’m going to the next town over” than for someone who has their kids enrolled in the highschool and a mortgage.

Everyone has skin in the game but some have way more.

I don’t know man but I also know that loopholes get exploited. I think local voting should be for actual locals.

To your point that so few people actually vote, it doesn’t take much to sway a local election.

I don’t want someone drifting through town in the local motel to be able to meaningfully vote to change the city I am rooted in.

It’s not like they were summarily executed. They are much freer now outside of corporate control to speak their minds as they please.

The only real question is if anyone deems them worth listening to.

As far as I can tell, no one seems to think much of value was lost.

Honestly the scary part is that we don’t really even need one more Opus. If all we had for the rest of our lives was Opus 4.5, the software engineering world would still radically change.

But there’s no sign of them slowing down.

Yeah, I might be early to this. And certainly, I still read a lot of code in my day to day right now.

But I sure write a lot less of it, and the percentage I write continues to go down with every new model release. And if I'm no longer writing it, and the person who works on it after me isn't writing it either, it changes the whole art of software engineering.

I used to spend a great deal of time with already working code that I had written thinking about how to rewrite it better, so that the person after me would have a good clean idea of what is going on.

But humans aren't working in the repos as much now. I think it's just a matter of time before the models are writing code essentially for their eyes, their affordances -- not ours.

> The hard thing about engineering is not "building a thing that works", its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible.

You’re talking like in the year 2026 we’re still writing code for future humans to understand and improve.

I fear we are not doing that. Right now, Opus 4.5 is writing code that later Opus 5.0 will refactor and extend. And so on.

It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

What they said sounded pretty direct to me.

> create pointless complexity

My exact thought.

A lot else has failed in your system, from access control to API design, if this becomes a problem. Security by obscurity isn’t the answer.

If the only thing between an attacker and your DB is that they can’t guess the IDs you’re already in some serious trouble.