I don't think that chart shows what it seems like it shows. There were plenty of pre-2018 outages that don't show up there: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545696000&dateRange=custom&...

An alternate interpretation of that chart is "After the microsoft acquisition, they got serious about actually tracking outages."

That said, anecdotally, it's felt much worse over the last 6 months. I'd guess it's a combination of MS-induced quality drops and AI-induced scale increases.

Then, when a style comment comes up in a PR, the answer is "Oh, do you think we should add that to our style guide? If so, let's discuss that in slack. Until then, though, that's not blocking."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...

I'm glad they called this out. For the first half of this, I kept thinking: "Either your answers are confidently wrong or you've done a ton of prep work to let your AIs be effective BI analysts." Sounds like it's the latter, and they're well aware of it!

Maybe that's just the date when they started tracking uptime using this sytem?

For real, I'm not certain we will ever be able to merge AI code without human review. But:

1. Every time I've confidently though "AI will never be able to do X" in the last year, I've later been proven wrong, so I'm a bit wary to assume that again without strong reasons.

2. I see blog posts by some of the most AI-forward people that seems to imply some people are already managing large codebases without human review of raw code. Maybe they're full of crap - there are certainly plenty of over-credulous bs artists in the AI space - but maybe they're not.

3. The returns on figuring this out are so incredibly high that, if it's possible, people will figure it out.

All that to say: it's far from certain, but my bias is that it is possible.

We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen. Some ideas that have already started floating around:

- Include the spec for the change in your PR and only bother reviewing that, on the assumption that the AI faithfully executed it

- Lean harder on your deterministic verification: unit tests, full stack tests, linters, formatters, static analysis

- Get better ai-based review: greptile and bugbot and half a dozen others

- Lean into your observability tooling so that AIs can fix your production bugs so fast they don't even matter.

None of these seem fully sufficient right now, but it's such a new problem that I suspect we'll be figuring this out for the next few years at least. Maybe one of these becomes the silver bullet or maybe it's just a bunch of lead bullets.

But anyone who's able to ship AI code without human review (and without their codebase collapsing) will run circles around the rest.

I do wish it attempted to answer the question at the end, though: "Sizes are all made up anyway — why can’t we make them better?"

Like, why doesn't the market solve for this? If the median woman can't buy clothing that fits in many brands, surely that's a huge marketing opportunity for any of the thousands of other clothing brands?

This is, to be clear, a sincere question - not a veiled argument against OP or anything! It seems like there are probably some structural or psychological or market forces stopping that from happening and I'd love to understand them. Same with the "womens clothes have no pockets" thing!

See also, Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge[0] in San Francisco

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_Lounge

This is about where I'm at. I love pure claude code for code I don't care about, but for anything I'm working on with other people I need to audit the results - which I much prefer to do in an IDE.

1. Do some research (as it's already done)

2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn

3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it

4. Manage to sell it

Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.

- Companies should hire juniors [at their own perceived detriment] to improve the overall industry

- Hire juniors because strong companies are resilient to junior mistakes [rather than hiring seniors and also becoming resilient]

- Juniors learning fast inspires others

- Juniors will teach your seniors how to use AI

Perhaps you can see why most companies don't find these terribly compelling.

Personally, I suspect we're going to have to wait for capitalism to fix this. Senior engineers will age out and the supply will drop. This will increase the cost of seniors until low-cost juniors start to look like a better option to the median hiring manager.

> After these zoom attempts, I didn't have any new moves left. I was being evicted. The bank repo'd my car. So I wrapped it there.

Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)

This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.

I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.

Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.

Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.

Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44637547

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