Readit Newsbbayles commented on Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering github.com/bethington/ghi... · Posted by u/xerzes
LLMs are very good at understanding decompiled code. I don't think people have updated on the fact that almost everything is effectively open source now!
>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.”
I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K+ line of code and promise that it works?
It feels like we're getting into an era where oceans of code which nobody understands is going to be produced, which we hope AGI swoops in and cleans?
I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?
bbayles commented on Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37... · Posted by u/rbanffy
I took GPs meaning that the QA person in question sucked, but them being the best meant the other QA folks they've worked with were even worse.
Let's call the person in question Alex. Having to make every new feature Alex-proof made all of the engineers better.
bbayles commented on Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37... · Posted by u/rbanffy
how did misunderstanding a feature and writing pages on it help, not sure I follow the logic of why this made them a good QA person? Do you mean the features were not written well and so writing code for them was going to produce errors?
In order to avoid the endless cycle with the QA person, I started doing this:
> This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.
Which is what I should have been doing in the first place!
bbayles commented on Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37... · Posted by u/rbanffy
I very rarely worked with good QA.
In my mind a good QA understands the feature we're working on, deploys the correct version, thoroughly tests the feature understanding what it's supposed and not supposed to do, and if they happen to find a bug, they create a bug ticket where they describe the environment in full and what steps are necessary to reproduce it.
For automation tests, very few are capable of writing tests that test the spec, not implementation, contain sound technical practices, and properly address flakiness.
For example it's very common to see a test that clicks the login button and instead of waiting for the login, the wait 20 seconds. Which is both too much, and 1% of the time too little.
Whenever I worked with devs, they almost always managed to do all this, sometimes they needed a bit of guidance, but that's it. Very very few QA ever did (not that they seemed to bothered by that).
A lot of QA have expressed that devs 'look down' on them. I can't comment on that, but the signal-to-noise ratio of bug tickets is so low, that often it's you have to do their job and repeat everything as well.
This has been a repeated experience for me with multiple companies and a lot of places don't have proper feedback loops, so it doesn't even bother them as they're not affected by the poor quality of bug reports, but devs have to spend the extra time.
I used to work with a QA person who really drove me nuts. They would misunderstand the point of a feature, and then write pages and pages of misguided commentary about what they saw when trying to test it. We'd repeat this a few times for every release.
This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.
...eventually I realized that this person was somehow the best QA person I'd ever worked with.
There's a typo in the URL here:
> If you have a topic in mind but are not sure if it is suitable for Paged Out!, check out the Writing Articles page or contact us
It links to `?page=writing.pho` rather than `.php`
bbayles commented on Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending · Posted by u/Javin007
(channeling Patrick McKenzie) If you have an S&P 500 index fund, you're a shareholder in Microsoft. Call their Investor Relations people, or send them a letter with this description. They will probably be of some help!