$10,000? That's a slap on the wrist. I don't say this lightly, this should have been jail time for someone. You're making a mockery of our most sacred institutions.
replies(6):
Why jail time for lawyers who use Chat-GPT, but not programmers? Are we that unimportant compared to the actual useful members of society, whose work actually has to be held to standards?
I don't think you meant it this way, but it feels like a frank admission that what we do has no value, and so compared to other people who have to be correct, it's fine for us to slather on the slop.
Do you think a Civil Engineer (PE) should be held liable if they vibe engineered a bridge using an LLM without reviewing the output? For this hypothetical, let’s assume an inspector caught the issue before the bridge was in use, but it would’ve collapsed had the inspector not noticed.
Programmers generally don't need a degree or license to work. Anyone can become a programmer after a few weeks of work. There are no exams to pass unlike doctors or lawyers.
speak for yourself. some of us are ready to retire and/or looking for parts of the field where code generation is verboten, for various reasons.
In absence of mitigations like laws and exams, it makes more important to use criminal and civil law to punish bad programmers.
Sort of like recklessly vibe coding and pushing to prod. The cardinal rule with AI is that we should all be free to use it, but we're still equally responsible for the output we produce, regardless of the tooling we use to get there. I think that applies equally across professions.
A single person can design a building, why not a bridge?
P.S. I sell and run commercial construction work
What do you understand sacred to be, and why would you include the legal system in that category?
> Someone would just take the plans exactly as listed, purchase the material as listed, and not one question ever would be raised? I would never trust a construction team that didn’t raise questions if not even to see if they themselves could skimp on material to pocket the difference.
You’re right, the contractor would likely catch the design issues if there were any, and possibly before that in the plan review/permitting process if the AHJ is on the ball.
I work in the electrical trade and I (and my electricians) find and correct errors frequently in engineered plans. We tell the engineer if it costs us more money to attempt to get a contract change order, but we keep it to ourselves if we can do it safely for cheaper. A common scenario I run into is a design with oversized feeders where you can use a smaller wire and still meet code, we just pull the smaller conductors and pocket the difference (assuming you bid the project using the larger wire size)
There should be a system where software developers are held personally responsible for various offenses, e.g. helping their employers break laws, but there also need to be legal protections that allow us to refuse such work without facing repercussions.