alt Hacker NewsIt's easier to find bugs, fix them, yet there's less will than ever. My bosses just want speed and will give me a 30 minute lecture on why I don't need to solve a bug that Claude solved in 5 minutes, I've verified, and it's already in an open PR. All the while we're pushing out bugs faster and faster.
No matter how good AI gets at fixing bugs we'll never fix them when there's no will to fix things. Software will never be good if there's no will to make good software. The problem has always been about will. To many better products. It's insane that in a time where we can do better on speed and quality we still choose speed and tell ourselves it's velocity
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Most places I've worked have been infuriatingly uninterested in fixing bugs, and would release software with major known bugs and a vague plan to fix them later. Of course, when "later" came, there were more features to cram. No time to fix those bugs.
I'm hoping one of the unintended side effect of it being essentially free to find and exploit (and fix) software bugs is that companies become less cavalier about shipping bugs in their software. Unlike most of the industry I don't believe "bugs are inevitable." Bugs are a choice developers make when they're rushing and careless and when all of their incentives are to ship quickly. You can ship bug-free software but it takes (or used to take) a really long time and a lot of care, care that commercial software developers just don't ever seem to muster.
Maybe when their software is getting 0wned over and over and 30 security issues are published a day, they'll start caring and taking their time.
!!! You described my experience in the workforce to a t! So frustrating that tech managers look at tech debt as a thing to be maintained at a certain level instead of allowing us to achieve perfection
If your boss asks for X feature and you split it into 4 PRs, 3 that implement X and a 4th that fixes a security bug, how would they know? Someone that uses those 30mins like that isn't reviewing your PRs themselves. Just fix it and be done with it. You only needed to argue with the boss when you needed to make time for it which would delay something else. If it just appears done they'll just react with clap emoji later when you announced you also fixed this extra thing.
My boss is a big yapper too
Very low signal information, preemptively trying to cover every rebuttal despite nobody ever planning on making one, in the few times someone does he plays devils advocate endlessly
Like bro just let us babysit these agents, everything’s going to happen
You will see, they will change both laws and expectations, to say its normal for software to always have terrible bugs. You can always solve a problem by lowering your expectations. :-)
Something that might come out of all of this is that companies that previously slow rolled security fixes will now be forced to fix them quickly, because the speed of AI and the liability of being insecure.