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425 points sfarshid | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.389s | source
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VincentEvans ◴[] No.45005596[source]
There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup.

Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years.

But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no longer be constrained by sandboxes of Excel or Access - they will ship multi-cloud edge-deployed kubernetes micro-services wired with Kafka, and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

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Cthulhu_ ◴[] No.45011626[source]
> and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

This will be the big counter to AI generated tools; at one point they become black boxes and the only thing people can do is to try and fix them or replace them altogether.

Of course, in theory, AI tooling will only improve; today's vibe coded software that in some cases generate revenue can be fed into the models of the future and improved upon. In theory.

Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.

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pelario ◴[] No.45012891[source]
> Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.

So, no compilers for you neither ?

(To be fair: I'm not loving the whole vibe coding thing. But I'm trying to approach this wave with open mind, and looking for the good arguments in both side. This is not one of them)

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pjc50 ◴[] No.45013041[source]
Apart from various C UB fiascos, the compiler is neither a black box nor magic, and most of the worthwhile ones are even determinstic.
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viralpraxis ◴[] No.45017707[source]
I’m sorry for an off-topic, are there any non-determenistic compilers you can name? I’d been wondering for a while if they actually exist
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1. pjc50 ◴[] No.45021736[source]
Accidental non-deterministic compilers are fairly easy if you use sort algorithms and containers that aren't "stable". You then can get situations where OS page allocation and things like different filenames give different output. This is why "deterministic build" wasn't just the default.

Actual randomness is used in FPGA and ASIC compilers which use simulated annealing for layout. Sometimes the tools let you set the seed.