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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Some things in it are dumb, but I'm a bit sympathetic: you literally can't test everything; organizational mandates to test everything ("we're TDD!") just slow down development without adding much if any value; and if your organization relies on not having any shitty programmers on the team, your organization is doomed to fail, because at scale you will get shitty programmers.

The thing that's absolutely unconscionable is the lack of staged rollouts. That limits the blast radius of bad releases no matter how stupid the person was who made the bad release. That's like SRE 101.

I would say I'm appalled and surprised at how bad that is, but I'm not. It's just the state of software engineering as a field. We're all idiots and should die in a fire. (I'm a bit grumpy because I spent the day integrating with an LLM-based auto code eval system that represents scores with emojis.)

Man, can't wait for machines to tell me my code is shit because it's doesn't look like the garbage they were trained on and do it in the most passive aggressive manner possible. I love the future.

Oh, the machines won't stop at just your code.

https://github-roast.pages.dev/

I would love to hear about that code eval system lol. What's it called?

(I'm a bit grumpy because I spent the day integrating with an LLM-based auto code eval system that represents scores with emojis.)

Gonna need to hear more about that.

Internal system that is actually pretty solid (in the sense that ✅🤡💩 etc. carry a pretty meaningful signal). Why the emojis then? My suspicion is that the team who trained it doesn't want it being used the way we want to use it (or, rather, the way our PM and our users want it to be used), which is the only thing that makes sense to me.

The overarching issue is wanting to shove LLMs into everything. Tokens corresponding to emojis aren't really any worse than tokens corresponding to floats, but people would take the float tokens and treat them much more seriously than they warrant.

Yeah, obviously people make mistakes, and I'm somewhat in jest about how stupid these mistakes are (but seriously no bounds checking, no integration testing) the obvious one though is the lack of staged rollouts, or a single integration test called "send the patch to a local machine and see what happens". I like to call that "stage 0 rollouts".

It's also just funny that the nature of the bug is something that once you see a crash report you spot the bug instantly. it's also a pretty easy bug that many 3rd year programming students would have been able to avoid IMO.

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