Second thoughts: Actually the fb.com post is more transparent than I'd have predicted. Not bad at all. Of course it helps that they're delivering good news!

I don't have an answer, but just seeing this thread has been cathartic for me.

Some of the options I'm considering (all speculative):

- It's okay to be a "hired gun" and switch companies every few years just to ensure you stay interested. Some people's minds are stimulated by novelty and learning; that's not a bad thing! In fact some of the engineers I most respect work as consultants not traditional employees.

- Try working at a more "stodgy" company. Your average Fortune 500 employs more developers than most unicorns and is probably a decade behind the curve in terms of technology-- maybe you can go to one of those, take it easy, and be a hero.

- If it's an option financially, "hire yourself" for a few months to go do a passion project-- hobbyist app? major OSS improvement? creative endeavor?-- and see how it feels.

Language support for that varies. Rust is great, but not perfect. Typescript is surprisingly good in many cases. Enums and algebraic type systems are your friend. It'll never be 100% but it sure helps fill a lot of holes in the swiss cheese.

Because there's no such thing as a purely internal error in a well-constructed program. Every "logic error" has to bottom out in data from outside the code eventually-- otherwise it could be refactored to be static. Client input is wrong? Error the request! Config doesn't parse? Better specify defaults! Network call fails? Yeah, you should have a plan for that.

Or for the more cynical, replace "search and rescue" with "military covert ops".

Rust can go that fast because of guarantees its compiler enforces about what the code is doing, that JS emphatically doesn't.

By all means build your tooling and runtime in Rust if it helps, but "you can write high-performance code in JS with no Rust-like constraints" is fundamentally a nonsense pitch.

TL;DR: We don't need to be radically agnostic about the capabilities of AI-- we have enough experience already with the software value chain (with and without AI) for formal verification to be an appealing next step, for the reasons this author lays out.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46282874

Points: 167

# Comments: 212

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177507

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The lack of canary: cause for concern, but I more or less believe Cloudflare when they say this is unavoidable given the use case. Good reason to be extra careful though, which in some ways they weren't.

The slowness to root cause: sheer bad luck, with the status page down and Azure's DDoS yesterday all over the news.

The broken SQL: this is the one that I'd be up in arms about if I worked for Cloudflare. For a system with the power to roll out config to ~all of prod at once while bypassing a lot of the usual change tracking, having this escape testing and review is a major miss.