In the late 90s, I remember everyone freaking out about Y2K. I knew how to write software, and I thought I understood the problem (and from a purely technical standpoint, I did). I wrote the whole thing off as people making a mountain of a molehill because surely no competent modern programmer would make a mistake like that, right? This opinion seemed validated when the year 2000 came and went without any apparent major incident.
Thing is, I was young, inexperienced, and naïve. I didn't understand a few things:
- How often hastily-written good-enough-for-now code finds its way into production systems in order to meet a deadline (also, how long legacy code tends to stick around (I'm looking at you, COBOL)).
- How much work went on behind the scenes scrambling to fix the problem before it happened.
Now, with LLMs, we have a way to generate such code at scale, and I can't help but wonder about the price we're going to pay for it down the line, all in the name of shipping code on an arbitrary deadline.
Jonathan Lamothe
Unknown parent • •Harald
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