3/19/2026 at 7:42:58 PM
This agent stuff is really making me lose respect for our industryAll the years of discussing programming/security best practices
Then cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matter, determinism is going out the window, and its becoming standard practice to have bots on our local PC constantly running unknown shell commands
by ex-aws-dude
3/19/2026 at 8:55:17 PM
We didn't collectively decided, we've got this forced down our throats to apply a novel tool to any imaginable situation because the execs got antsy about being left behind.A truly absurd amount of capital was deployed which triggered a cascade of reactions by the people in charge of capital at other places. They are extremely anxious that everything will change under their feet, and if they don't start using as much as humanly possible of it right about now they die.
That's it.
The tools have definitely found some use, there's more to learn on how else they can be used, and maybe over time smart people will settle on ways to wrangle it well. The messaging from the execs though, is not that, it is "you'll be measured on how much you use this, we don't know for what or how, it's for you to figure out but don't dare to not use it".
I do understand their anxiety, their job is to not let their companies die, and make the most money as they can in the process; a seemingly major shift on the foundations of their orgs will cause fear.
But we have not collectively decided that it was safe, and good, to run rampant with these tools without caring for all that was learnt since software was invented...
by piva00
3/19/2026 at 8:59:09 PM
This wasn't really forced on us.The whole industry is like a fashion show and has been for a long time. This is just exceptionally stupid compared to moderately stupid things before. I see it ore that everyone's wearing pink feathered chicken suits because it's in fashion. If you don't wear a pink feathered chicken suit then you're a luddite scumbag who doesn't deserve the respect of your peers.
However some of us still have enough self-respect not to be seen dead in a pink feathered chicken suit. I mean I'm still pissed off at half the other stuff we do in the industry. I haven't even really looked at the chicken suits yet.
by dgxyz
3/19/2026 at 9:43:27 PM
If you work in a tech company with >5k employees it's extremely likely it's been forced down on you to wear the pink feathered chicken suit, and told to not complain about the pink feathered chicken suit because it is the inevitable future, and no one will be wearing anything that doesn't look like it ever again. Also, we are watching every straggler not in a pink feathered chicken suit, put yours on or leave the building.by piva00
3/19/2026 at 9:58:04 PM
If enough people say no, it'll stop.For ref I'm usually the guy who comes in and cleans up all the chicken corpses after.
by dgxyz
3/20/2026 at 7:04:19 AM
Enough people could say no and take a stance if there was collective solidarity in the tech industry. Unfortunately we don't have that, tech workers are in the vast majority skeptical of or anti anything resembling unionised work. The bosses won on that front, and now they can dictate freely that you must wear the pink feathered chicken suit.People, in general, want to keep their jobs, saying no is an option when you don't care what happens with it or have the backing of the collective to walk out together.
by piva00
3/19/2026 at 11:35:30 PM
I don't know what is so mysterious about the following:People can't just leave Wednesday and be in a new job with the same or better pay next Monday.
Rent/mortgage, bills and food are still due.
Comments like yours always baffle me. Empty idealism.
For the record, I usually get called to clean up and make things good again as well. Most of my career was like that.
by pdimitar
3/20/2026 at 10:00:14 AM
> People can't just leave Wednesday and be in a new job with the same or better pay next Monday.They don't have to leave, they can refuse to comply with unreasonable requests which are likely to cause harm by jeopardizing the security of user data.
Maybe your position is too precarious to risk getting fired, but if your job is asking you to do something unethical then you should be doing everything you can to get yourself out of that situation, either by supporting unionization or by being willing to take a manageable pay cut to find a new job as soon as possible.
If you're a software developer then you can almost certainly afford at least a moderate pay cut for upholding ethical conduct. The vast majority can even if we don't want to, but these situations are where we find out if our ethics are for sale or not.
by dns_snek
3/20/2026 at 2:00:56 PM
A fairly filter-bubble take.> Maybe your position is too precarious to risk getting fired
You mean yours isn't? Or even that of at least 95% of all devs worldwide? I can definitely say "no" to my CEO if he wants something too big that would take too much time and energy for questionable business results -- I am even expected to ground him. But if my colleagues hand me a ticket, I cannot just refuse without repercussions. I'll not get fired on the spot, that much is certain. But if it happens 2-3 times they'll start looking for a replacement. Same will happen if I outright tell my CEO I can't do something due to ethical concerns. That's how it is almost everywhere I looked and asked (and have very rarely worked with US companies).
> If you're a software developer then you can almost certainly afford at least a moderate pay cut
I can't even afford a 10% pay cut. I want to live in your world.
by pdimitar
3/20/2026 at 3:06:08 PM
The thing you two are missing is "solidarity" and our industry sucks at it. In fact, it's been relied upon and conditioned into most IT/tech types we're "special" somehow in a way blue collar workers aren't. We aren't and the same dynamics apply. If everyone stops asking the boss how high to jump, and refuses to jump, only then will you see a meaningful reining in of behavior in executives. That action potential has to start somewhere, and as the current generation of alleged adults in the room, we're it. Our juniors need an example set or the cycle repeats. It isn't empty idealism. It's hard effing pragmatism at it's most brutal. If we don't change, nothing can change. Therefore, we must change.by salawat
3/20/2026 at 4:31:11 PM
Yes I am missing it, as in, I know it's theoretically possible but I've never once seen it. It seems to be a fantasy.> It isn't empty idealism.
It is if it's never happening. Pragmatism it would be if it was already an established practice.
I like my dragons purple btw.
> If we don't change, nothing can change. Therefore, we must change.
Obviously. But that "if" is trying to lift an impossible amount of weight is what I am saying. It's one of those powerless "oh, if only!" cries that we the people are prone to.
by pdimitar
3/20/2026 at 7:50:14 PM
You think execs don't know that? You think politicians don't know that? You know, there's a reason why in primary education we covered the Gilded Age, the Robber Barons, The Labor Movement, all that jazz. "We the People" aren't passive. When we get poked hard enough, often enough to be roused, it scares the bajeezus out of anyone trying to "drive" or "manage" the system.You ever been hushed by a higher up in a company for talking about compensation? Did you point to the sign required by law as a reminder you have Rights? When times get like this, you have to dredge up the things you've put away because everything was going so good.
Now, it isn't, and your neck is on the block. You will die. You will be offered up for slaughter at the first inconvenience. This is unavoidable. The calculus of business is not something that the ones executing business are going to change voluntarily. They have to be forced to change by the environment. You are the agent that makes up the environment. So your choice is, walk into the inevitable like livestock to the slaughter, or work with your fellow man and take a few chunks of the machine with you. The first step to collective action is accepting you might not ever get to see the shade of the tree you're planting. Once you accept that; the course is clear. It's not empty ideals anymore. It's action. Your action, because you matter, everyone else matters, and it's the right thing to do, and if what's going on is someone else's idea of right, you ain't selling everyone else into it, because that, (what's going on) is wrong.
Ever heard of a Judas goat? Same thing. Herd follows it calmly. Manager's and execs are 100% aware of the dynamic and on guard. The only counterbalance against the dismissal reflex is making it too costly to dismiss all the individual actors at once. We're in the machine. The machine is us. If we don't like how it works... Time for change. I got a lot of days left, and I don't intend to leave the world working like it is, because it is not working for the vast majority of us.
So in conclusion, do what you want. I'm not here to convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But I see a fairer, more equitable world where we aren't subjugated by wannabe despots at the top of corporate hierarchies, but partners in making, delivering, and consuming goods and services, to the mutual benefit of all. Not just a lucky few. We were there once, and we can be there again; but we have to accept the way isn't making it possible for a privileged few to set the terms of exchange unilaterally. There has to be good faith. In the abcense there of, there will be conflict. They want things to just work and make them money. We want to eat, and be able to live reasonably well on a living wage without having to lock horns with and wrestle for every damn crumb against a capital wielding class more interested in extraction than being benefactors and stewards of a meta-stable system that serves everybody.
by salawat
3/19/2026 at 9:19:35 PM
Force is seeping in. Managements are expecting that LLM-driven prouctivity-enhancers will be deployed and give broad-based boosts. More are each week. Supposedly cheaper than people. Those that aren't yet might be soon. When your performance review includes facility with and productivity with LLM tools, you are being forced.by quantified
3/19/2026 at 10:39:34 PM
my assessment of the situation: "we've spent so much money on AI's promise to give us 5x, 10x returns, that now we have to earn it back by foisting the burden on developers to make up the gains by working harder, at least enough to recoup the exec's decision to pour money into the boondoggle"."Hey developers, we spent $x million on Claude, who promised 7x returns, so YOU better make it 7x more efficient so we don't look bad".
by gosub100
3/20/2026 at 3:28:49 AM
yea the real frightening thing about this is, if there is a clear failure to get roi on this stuff, the top-level people will be very reticent to walk it all back and admit it was a royal fuckupby andrekandre
3/19/2026 at 9:22:56 PM
The "whole industry." What, like 5 companies?This is a "monopolized sector." They absolutely forced it on you. In most cases, sure, not directly, but their influence is the only driving force. Absent this no one would have jumped on this flimsy bandwagon.
by themafia
3/19/2026 at 9:51:24 PM
We had it forced down our throats by CEOs and CTOs who thought that it would improve our productivity. Nobody forced it down their throats, though. Instead, they were seduced. They went willingly.by AnimalMuppet
3/19/2026 at 11:00:09 PM
In one gig I was on, a consultant showed up and started saying that the platform was not good because it didn't have any machine learning(this is pre-AI buzz words). So the executives asked me when can I fix the platform to have machine learning in it. They didn't have an answer when I simply asked "machine learning to do what?" and my explanation of what machine learning is or can be used for went to deaf ears. So yeah, definitely agree on seduced and then went willingly and blindly.by scorpioxy
3/19/2026 at 9:35:53 PM
no. openclaw wasnt forced by ceo's. it was forced by the same people who though there was money to be made in crypto then ICO then NFT. a bunch of scammers that bring negative value to the worldby retinaros
3/19/2026 at 9:45:05 PM
And they make money. A scammer is the President of the United States.At a certain point why blame people for trying to keep up? Why are scammers so successful? It seems to me we have a systemic failure at a societal level. Until we are honest about that it will only get worse. Until then maybe some rouge LLM botching some critical system will be the wake up call we need.
I am not sure what to make of critiques that seem to rest on notions of a small population of scammers preying upon the doe-eyed public. I think the situation is a bit closer to Carlin: garbage in, garbage out. A critique that holds up quite excellently in this AI age.
by pear01
3/20/2026 at 12:42:08 AM
> At a certain point why blame people for trying to keep up?No.
by DANmode
3/19/2026 at 9:56:19 PM
western society is a shelve of its former glory. it did not last long but there was an age were man was capable of greatness. the early internet kinda was the last stretch of this short run then money corrupted it. the underlying issue stems from abandoning cultural education as a Western value. Instead, we've opted to dispense raw ideology devoid of any thinking mechanism that we now seek so dearly to integrate to LLMs so that they can be more like us. This sloppening manifested in our lives through every medium. We witnessed it when animation shifted to 3D, providing slop and poorly designed characters and stories. We witnessed it when video games all adopted the same game engines, look and feel and lack of narrative stakes, slopping ideology down players’ throats- no nuance, no wit, just mind-numbing dogma that punishes anyone who dares to criticize.Perhaps most damaging was Netflix's infiltration of our households that has accelerated our collective intellectual atrophy through relentless ideologically charged content parroting as entertainment. Meanwhile, our children's minds are being shaped not by family or tradition but by the algorithms of TikTok and Snapchat.The past decade and a half hasn't just prepared LLMs to replicate human abilities it has systematically stripped away human complexity, reshaping us into predictable patterns, not to raise LLMs to our level, but to reduce us to theirs, until the distinction no longer matters.by retinaros
3/19/2026 at 8:09:38 PM
Our industry has never been serious about security. We all download and run unvetted code via package managers every day. At least now the insanity is out in the open. We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes.by testplzignore
3/19/2026 at 8:25:59 PM
I keep getting so depressed thinking about the inevitable. Quite simply, humans can't scale or iteratively improve. We still need to eat, we still need to sleep, we can only think on one thread at a time basically, we take 20 years to get to our prime, which is a fleeting moment, while most of our lifespan is spent in a state of decline of capability. AI humanoid robot from the near future doesn't need to eat or sleep, can work 24/7, can compute thousands of processes in parallel, is the same fungible unit as any other humanoid robot, forever with some maintenance. Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world? It is more profitable for the company to have humans go extinct and maximize planetary resource use to its fullest extent possible.Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.
by asdff
3/19/2026 at 9:50:01 PM
I don't think it will be cost effective to build humanoid robots to do most tangible work. Why assemble an expensive masterpiece of servomotors, chips, plastic and steel, when billions of desperate humans are right there and only cost 2.5 meals a day and a small shelter?Of course, intelligence will be a solved problem so "20 years of training" won't be needed. You'll just be the hardware. AI will tell you to pick up that box, place it on that conveyor belt, place the autowelder at that seam and wait for the green light, turn the wrench to install bolt B in part C. If you don't wish to, or no longer can, so be it. Another, hungrier human will replace you. After all more are made every day, and they are capable of doing this type of labor by age 10 or so. And what else would they do with their time, go to school and get a completely useless education?
All of this will of course be in service of our technofeudal lords, the owner class. Some robots will be needed for heavy lifting and for the jobs that are too sensitive to trust a human in, like personal security and strikebreaking. Can't risk trusting a serf for those tasks. But for most physical grunt work humans will be cheaper. Shockingly cheap, when they have no other options.
Did that make you less depressed?
by rspeele
3/20/2026 at 12:12:46 AM
> I don't think it will be cost effective to build humanoid robots to do most tangible work. Why assemble an expensive masterpiece of servomotors, chips, plastic and steel, when billions of desperate humans are right there and only cost 2.5 meals a day and a small shelterIf all you have to offer people is this kind of sad fucking "2.5 meals a day and a small shelter" while you live on yachts and eat like a king, eventually they will gang up and kill you
by bluefirebrand
3/20/2026 at 1:01:00 AM
> eventually they will gang up and kill youI’m looking around the world and thinking this “eventually” isn’t happening very fast.
Not an optimistic thought.
by fn-mote
3/20/2026 at 1:38:53 AM
From history, it usually doesn't happen very fast, then it happens very fastby bluefirebrand
3/20/2026 at 12:51:42 AM
I keep wondering when the west will get tired of having kings and they keep surprising me. I assume humanity get to The Culture eventually, but I'm starting to doubt that Americans will be leading the way on that front.But maybe Altmans AI will break out and do it for us.
by r14c
3/20/2026 at 2:09:29 AM
I sure hope you are right.by rspeele
3/19/2026 at 8:32:53 PM
>and don't even realize it.Oh, many of us realize it, but doing anything about Moloch is much, much harder.
by pixl97
3/20/2026 at 12:48:03 AM
Isn't the problem that Altman and his peers are calling the shots here? We could use robots to work less and spend more time enjoying life, but we can only imagine being crushed under a boot and starving.by r14c
3/20/2026 at 2:27:59 AM
Surely we can accelerate human training. Just install a brain implant which administers an electric shock whenever the subject deviates from the official training plan.by nradov
3/19/2026 at 8:50:26 PM
To what end though? Are the robots going to take over and trade busy work amongst themselves forever? What would that accomplish?by nancyminusone
3/19/2026 at 9:13:32 PM
Your comment made me wonder what if animals wonder the same about us humans :-)by Imustaskforhelp
3/20/2026 at 9:57:34 AM
> Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world?I should not need to justify my existence, that is the problem with being led by psychopaths.
Twenty years to train humans for what? A tech job? That is not why we get an education. It is not my purpose to be a cog in the wheel for some psychotic billionaire.
by spicymaki
3/19/2026 at 9:32:13 PM
Yes and also the software industry has never been truly serious about security either: it's more of implied table stakes than an advertised product feature.Also, customers outsource the risk to their vendors, so as long as there's someone to sue, nobody worries about doing it right. Ship it now and pay the lawyers later.
by imglorp
3/19/2026 at 9:03:19 PM
This is never getting to skynet launching the nukes stage. It's not that clever and never will be.Humans will kill us by it damage amplifying their worst characteristics.
Thus we'll die of a pandemic because some idiot LLM'ed up positive looking virology data when they were being too lazy to verify something. Everyone will trust it because they don't really care as long as it looks about right.
by dgxyz
3/19/2026 at 8:27:18 PM
> We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes.And then we won't need to, because at that point it will be too late.
by sunrunner
3/20/2026 at 7:33:24 AM
It has never been serious about security, quality and performance. Only new sloppy features. And now everyone is bragging on LinkedIn how fast they create more slop: "Look, CC generated thousands lines of code for me! Approve and merge!"by ponector
3/19/2026 at 8:38:45 PM
Agents are providing to employees the long overdue benefits limited liability companies long enjoyed: Gambling with upside for themselves and other peoples downsides.by heisenbit
3/19/2026 at 8:49:14 PM
That's a fun insight. Have you / others written about this?by nickpinkston
3/19/2026 at 10:39:48 PM
“Heads I win, tails you lose” as a business concept has been written about quite a bit.“The Gervais Principle” is an oft-cited one.
by BoxFour
3/19/2026 at 8:50:21 PM
They technically have, just now.by moffkalast
3/19/2026 at 8:21:16 PM
I’ve never had respect for the industry as a whole, only individuals within. There has a been a serious lack of rigor and professionalism in software engineering for as long as I’ve been a part of itby superb_dev
3/19/2026 at 8:34:12 PM
It's a slap in the face that we tack engineering onto it. A very small percentage of software engineering is as rigorous as actual engineering.by jihadjihad
3/20/2026 at 4:31:34 AM
As someone who works in a few different engineering disciplines, I think software engineers often have a very rosy picture of other areas of engineering. The problems are different, but things are not any better on average.by rcxdude
3/19/2026 at 9:04:51 PM
As an actual engineer who moved into software "engineering", yes this. It kills me.by dgxyz
3/20/2026 at 12:43:48 AM
Top three things lacking?(In your personal opinion)
by DANmode
3/20/2026 at 11:50:58 AM
Fads and fashion over strong, tested technology.Attitude that you can fix broken stuff later and customers are fine with it.
Charlatans and fuckwits everywhere who wouldn't last a second in a traditional engineering discipline.
by dgxyz
3/19/2026 at 9:45:13 PM
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think that's the case in most of the non English speaking world.Mostly we're just called programmers.
by emptyfile
3/20/2026 at 5:56:13 PM
The frustrating part is watching all the careful thinking about reliability and failure modes get thrown out the window the second something new gets hyped. It's not even that people disagree with the principles, they just stop applying them.by brian_r_hall
3/19/2026 at 10:23:49 PM
I think it might be because we (or at least I) used to associate insecure actions with people, not computers. Computers should know better, right? Recently, I spotted that Opus 4.6 found config files for one of its tools and gave itself access to my whole filesystem. Similarly, Gemini CLI will rewrite itself if you let it.by dr_kiszonka
3/20/2026 at 1:27:38 PM
There's nothing "collectively" about it. I don't know what industry you work in, but in mine it's a top down mandate to use AI everywhere, tracked with KPIs, from the CEO down, and supported and pressured by companies like Amazon and MS.We're the dummies that have to run around picking up dookies like a new puppy in the house.
by mancerayder
3/19/2026 at 7:55:40 PM
> Then cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matterIs this new to people? I figured this out when I first entered the industry. The messages have never been particularly subtle.
by polothesecond
3/19/2026 at 10:37:07 PM
Right? I was like when did software quality matter. Let alone code quality lolby exolymph
3/19/2026 at 8:22:34 PM
It’s a nightmare… the problem is it’s far too easy for people to set these agents up - without understanding the security implications.We’ve covered so many issues already on our blog (grith.ai)
by edf13
3/19/2026 at 8:24:32 PM
The number of wasted hours spent talking about code quality and patterns has to be astronomical.by wnevets
3/19/2026 at 9:16:53 PM
Don't worry, ai read all the transcripts and blogs and emails and has at least ingested some of the ethos in its outputs.I self taught and wrote a small saas in 2017. Pays well enough to support me.
I'm building a new one using AI this year. I promise you, it's better built and more secure than what my previous still in use Saas is.
by throwawaytea
3/19/2026 at 10:16:20 PM
> cut to 2026 and suddenly its like we just collectively decided software quality doesn't matterI saw the sea change in 2008 when quality process got replaced with velocity and testing tasks. I've watched everything from Experian and health record data leaks to Windows 11 since that change. Software quality hasn't mattered for a long time.
by zzgo
3/19/2026 at 9:00:21 PM
The media isn’t helping. This wasn’t a “rogue AI”. It was a system that was given permission by a human operator.We don’t say “a rogue plane killed 300 people today when it crashed into a mountain”.
The only difference in the AI case is that some people are attempting to shift blame for their incompetence into a computer system, and the media is going along with it because it increases clicks.
by antonvs
3/19/2026 at 9:34:00 PM
> It was a system that was given permission by a human operator.From TFA:
"But the agent also independently publicly replied to the question after analyzing it, without getting approval first."
by cassianoleal
3/19/2026 at 9:56:24 PM
Again, these are systems that have been explicitly given the ability to perform these actions. Trying to claim that it was somehow the AI’s fault is sheer incompetence and/or self-serving deceptiveness.You can’t authorize a system to take some action and then complain when it takes that action. The “approval” you quoted is not a security constraint. Someone who confuses it for a security constraint is incompetent.
by antonvs
3/19/2026 at 10:27:30 PM
the ridiculous anthropomorphism is killing me. Software 'agents' can't ask for 'approval', they're not persons. That's like saying my script didn't ask me for approval to modify the system after I ran it with sudo privileges.The developer is solely responsible for what APIs they expose to a bot. No you can't say your software agent was grumpy and mean and had a bad day. It is not a human intern, it is an unreliable chatbot who someone ran with permissions it should not have had.
by Barrin92
3/19/2026 at 7:46:04 PM
People salivate so hard at the thought of the high level of automation promised that they're willing to do away with privacy altogether and live in Data Communism.My thinking is, this will increase the demand for backup and other resilience solutions.
by aeblyve
3/19/2026 at 7:52:19 PM
> People salivate so hard at the thought of the high level of automation promised that they're willing to do away with privacy altogether and live in Data Communism.This occurred long time ago comrade 'aeblyve.
by _doctor_love
3/19/2026 at 7:53:57 PM
‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or this may express the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetter. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation leads sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’Marx
by aeblyve
3/20/2026 at 1:57:30 AM
He wasn’t wrong on that one.by _doctor_love
3/20/2026 at 9:59:45 AM
Meta has never in its entire existence been known for caring about software quality.by JuniperMesos
3/20/2026 at 11:06:46 AM
M8... https://github.com/facebook/inferby a-french-anon
3/19/2026 at 8:32:05 PM
I think it's batshit crazy. That's why I wrote yoloAI, so I could sandbox it up properly and control EXACTLY what comes out of that sandbox, diff style.https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai
I can't go back anymore. Going back to a non-sandboxed Claude feels like going back to a non-adblocked browser.
by kstenerud
3/19/2026 at 8:02:03 PM
How can you respect an industry that doesn't respect itself?by yoyohello13
3/19/2026 at 7:56:22 PM
Turns out all of the frenzy of the ZIRP era is piddling compared to what happens when ZIRP is taken away.by Apocryphon
3/20/2026 at 12:23:05 AM
The whole agent ecosystem is a ridiculous shitshow. All of this because you need to ASAP find something believable to sell your overinflated, bullshit machine to the masses. Otherwise the bubble will burst.by lofaszvanitt
3/20/2026 at 1:14:21 AM
[dead]by suhputt
