It’s amazing how many replies I’m getting that “vibe coding is fine, it doesn’t matter if software actually works”.
People literally die or get hurt all the time when websites or apps don’t work, because they get false information or they’re incorrectly flagged or they hit some edge case and stuff just doesn’t happen.
Power gets turned off. Medications don’t arrive. Accounts get frozen. Credit scores ruined. Personal information leaked.
If you don’t take making software seriously you should fuck right off and leave the field.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
Or the business you are writing this crap code for for goes bust and you end up unemployed 🫤
🤦♂️
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io @danirabbit@mastodon.online 
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
I'm not an AI zealot, but, like, the "sometimes software is very important" argument has to at least acknowledge that sometimes software is not very important
I put a lot of effort into a product that AFAICT mostly exists to help teenagers carefully and lovingly render big anime titties in a social environment, and while our uptime is on par with many more impactful endeavors I'm under no illusions that what I'm doing is serious
There was one guy who tried three times to provoke me into a reaction (I blocked them).
The way people identify as “AI” enthusiasts is indistinguishable from religious extremism.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io At work, I make software that's used to manage power in wind farms, on ships and in emergency generators (among other things, in hospitals). We have to simultaneously make sure that 1. every hardware quirk is properly managed and/or compensated for, 2. operators can actually use the devices, 3. cybersecurity is tight enough that motivated attackers can't easily take down critical infrastructure, and 4. if there's some disaster, everything can be handled without killing anyone or blowing up a generator. Scenarios that nobody considers for desktop or mobile applications pop up all the time - aside from all the usual concurrency hell, "what if power is lost at precisely the wrong time" is something we explicitly have to code for.
I won't sign off on code I can't vouch for. So even if I were to hypothetically vibe code at work, I certainly wouldn't vibe test, vibe review or vibe verify.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
My uncle used to work in a wind tunnel lab. If things go wrong with the control system, the building will explode.
Microsoft tried very hard to get in as a preferred vendor. Finally, during a demo (inverted pendulum controlled by Windows NT), my uncle stuck a floppy disk in the controller. It stopped to read the disk and the pendulum fell over.
"That pendulum represents everyone in this room, and now they're spread from here to Gatineau. Get it?"
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
So apparently one of the advantages of a formal CS education is they tell you about the disasters to remind you that code quality matters.. I remember these
Theres Therac 25
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Which did kill people
And the arianne 5 launch which cost 370 million 1990s dollars
https://smartbear.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster/
@alienghic@timeloop.cafe @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io No need for a CS degree (don't have one myself) - I learned it in my first job (embedded) when I asked what the machine is going to be used for - the machine for which I was writing QA-software to test it. Feom that day on, I knew all software needs to work to rhe best of the abilities of the people involved - and the people need to be real craftspeople, who want to be proud of their craft.
Being Left Behind Enjoyer
