30 years working in this industry and I'd say that's the exception rather than the rule. When it comes to large systems.

I frankly think it's a legit POV, and I'm also local to this, so I'm going to use my own much higher karma to post it again:

https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/

I think there are legitimate concerns in promoting American BigTech as provider of infrastructure/services in Toronto. Concerns about data collection, about technological autonomy, and local employment.

I have written probably a dozen software synthesizers over the last 20 years, for fun, never profit. I would have preferred those to be hardware products. But I lack all of the above. As do most.

I have worked in several embedded companies. The software that runs on them was often considered to be the least important part of the expense chain despite involving the most amount of total work hours.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104542

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Super-VL-1...

And their own benchmarks seem to show it well behind of Qwen 3.8 flash next on pretty much everything except generation speed.

You can write it, but can you maintain it? Can you even fully understand what was built? Can you staff the team to manage the bugs? The potential data loss?

but i'm prepared to be surprised, maybe they'll conjure up something standalone useful this time

Projects seem to be getting approved or pushed there purely on the basis of showing off that they can vibe-build infrastructure.

Which.. yes, you can. But now maintain it. Understand it. Manage thousands of people using it. Those are part of the reasons we re-use proven solutions rather than rolling our own -- not just because the coding part is hard.

Same thing happened with the Bun rewrite. "Oh wow, look what we can do! What's that, nobody adult supervision telling us that this is a bad idea? Let's go!"

Even Google started with Perforce originally and only forked/rebuilt when it stopped being able to scale. And did so in a very incremental fashion.

What is douchey is presenting the whole thing as some sort of intense novelty and stroke of genius required in the age of agents when it's just doing what the other BigCo companies did to scale their monorepos already. Like a decade (or more) ago.

The reality it is when I first read the thing I was -- as a Xoogler -- like "Oh, yeah, so, like Piper & SrcFs and the stuff that Meta also does" and really didn't understand why they wouldn't have started with something off the shelf inside of vibe-conjuring a clone that they would then have to support

To me it speaks ill, again, of the engineering culture at Anthropic. "We do these things not because they are useful, but because they are novel."

Don't they have better things to do at Anthropic than building their own source control or rewriting Bun from scratch in another language? Like, y'know, basic site reliability? Or a coding harness that doesn't eat multiple GB of RAM?

And it's happening now for doctors, too, even here in Canada with our single-payer universal healthcare.

Can't go in there without them trying to tell me to put a chunk of plastic in my mouth to stop the grinding. (As described in TFA).

Described as a diagnostic by them, a problem we discovered in you, mr porcupine... But strangely recommended to every other single person I've talked to. Very scientific.

Paid for by insurance of course.

I did this once years ago and the mouth guard was both annoying and disgusting. Never again.

Everything is priced exactly the maximum that your insurance provider will pay.

When I was (and am) contracting and didn't have insurance anymore... the plastic-pushing stopped, remarkably.

Regular cleaning and fillings are important. But so much of their business seems to have degraded into orthotics for the face.

Things were shifting to Go gradually as I left though.

I've been doing Rust full time for the last half-decade and hobby before that, and its slow compile times have always been a pain point.

And I've found its slow cycle around compile-then-test is a real pain point with agentic development. Agents get into loops trying things out, and verifying their results, and they tend to accumulate a pile of tests on top of that (which require periodic cleanup). Forward progress often gets successively more slow and painful as compile times start to dominate most of what the agent is doing.

For application -- not systems dev work -- I've been considering making a move to using something like OCaml instead.

What's happening in Brazil right now should give people pause about thinking that an interregnum with someone left-ish in power trying to restore normality will reset things to a saner state.

These are people totally willing to burn the crops and salt the fields. Trump could die tomorrow and a thousand heads would pop up looking to benefit from the anger and resent.

Clarity about relationship with the rest of PIE would definitely be enhanced by having a corpus from substantially earlier on.