My company has been trying a new model when product folks cut through the red tape of "engineering" and just describe what they want to a powerful LLM pipeline and review the app in a beta env. Sounds perfect, right?

Dear reader, in the couple months this has been going on, these people have caused a dozen high profile SEVs due to extremely poor app performance, networking / kubernetes configuration bugs, bad scaling, observability oversights, supply chain attacks, leaking sensitive information, and cost overruns (on practically every resource they provision).

Some very well-paid people are scrambling to figure out the value that was generated by this pilot program; I'm heating up popcorn rather than holding my breath.

[–] Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 65 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Should have added "no mistakes, no bugs" to the prompt! Pffft, amateur.

[–] Flower@sh.itjust.works 20 points 32 minutes ago

That takes me back to 2004

No Smoke, by unknown,

Tech: "Hello. How can I help you today?"

Customer: "There's smoke coming from the power supply on my computer."

Tech: "Sounds like you need a new power supply."

Customer: "No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files."

Tech: "Sir, what you describe is a faulty power supply. You need to replace it."

Customer: "No way! Someone told me that I just had to change the system startup files to fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the right command."

(Ten minutes later...)

Tech: "Well, we don’t normally tell our customers this, but there's an undocumented command that will fix the problem. Add the line "LOAD NOSMOKE.COM" at the end of the CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine."

(Five minutes later...)

Customer: "It didn’t work. The power supply is still smoking."

Tech: "Well, what version of Windows are you using?"

Customer: "Windows 98."

Tech: "Well, that's your problem. That version of Windows doesn't include NOSMOKE. You'll need to contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch."

(When nearly an hour had passed, the phone rang again...)

Customer: "I need a new power supply."

Tech: "How did you come to that conclusion?"

Customer: "Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what you said, and he started asking me questions about the make of the power supply."

Tech: "What did he tell you?"

Customer: "He said my power supply is not compatible with NOSMOKE."

[–] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 25 minutes ago

"or you go to jail"

[–] voidsignal@lemmy.world 21 points 2 hours ago

Lol. "do magic"

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 31 points 2 hours ago

I could have done the same for a quarter the cost!

[–] renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone 27 points 2 hours ago (4 children)

letting your agent run commands without reviewing them first is peak stupid

[–] john_lemmy@slrpnk.net 4 points 14 minutes ago

Claude code even added an auto mode so that you don't get blocked by that pesky reviewing anymore. Since then, the usual mode of asking before running a command, for instance when the thing wants to read the entire codebase looking for information only available in an online doc, is now called manual mode; the non 10x developer mode.

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 hour ago

Having production credentials in a dev environment is more stupider but they'll never learn because they outsourced their thinking.

[–] placebo@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

As well as storing production credentials in plain text in an .env file.

[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 28 points 2 hours ago

Creating an environment that incentivizes not thinking is peak stupid.

[–] thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 hours ago

should have used Weaviate.