alt Hacker News> About 20 Markdown files described browser use, connectors, payments, credentials, data handling, generated files, voice, goals, and scheduling.
This the state of software engineering in 2026.
Edit: clarified engineering to software engineering, which is more correct
Replies
Software engineering - other fields of engineering are slightly less pathological
You're being downvoted, but I think you've hit the nail on the head.
So many people, especially managers, have decided they can just give the rules to the AI in English and let it make "decisions", and they think it'll do it correct every time.
"Engineering" a few years ago meant that code was written, was (mostly) deterministic, and could be debugged. Computer processing didn't mean relying on Human-like processes, it meant relying on hard-coded logic.
This is absolutely one of those "gets worse before it gets better" things, and will probably never go away fully now.
Programmers know not to tell ChatGPT to do a bunch of data processing. If they use it at all, they tell it to write code that will then do the processing. It's more efficient on tokens, and if it fails, you can fix the process, instead of wondering why it went wrong, like too much context, or the LLM model version changed and doesn't work the same now, or just randomness.
Beats thousands of npm modules and hundreds of megabytes of an Electron runtime per desktop app, if you ask me!
In the great POSIX, Windows vs. Apple filesystems debate, and iPad "what is a file", the great AI Overlords propose: "what if the filesystem was soup?". Manufacturer instructions, public data, and user's instructions and data, all sort of swimming together.
Could also phrase it "What if the filesystem was SOUP?"
I call it magic genie engineering. We rub the AI lamp and think if we just ask our question in the exact perfect way that it will obey us.
"Engineering is the practical science of designing, building, and testing structures, machines, systems, and processes to solve real-world problems"
Did this system go through: design? yes, building: yes, testing: yes, is it a system: yes, does it solve real-world problem: yes.
but markdowns and LLMs with their fuzzy probabilistic feelings are beneath you i assume? you can ignore the fact that we have intelligence deployed to the billions, understand english, follow instructions..yeah, in case you missed, machines can now understand english better than you and me.
it was certainly useful for me to understand how the agent worked!
Feels like the "ini files" era. I suspect at some point some kind of database is coming for these settings.
this is basically some Prayer Book of the Mechanicus Adeptus type shit
pray to the Omnissiah the machine holds!
To be fair there's probably a considerable amount of engineering that went into evaluating those markdown files so the agent behaviour is statistically reliable. The markdown is the product, not the process