bluesnowmonkey (u/bluesnowmonkey)

bluesnowmonkey commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

bluesnowmonkey · 3 days ago

> Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.

First of all, no it’s not. Your job is to help the company succeed. If you write code that works but doesn’t help the company succeed, you failed. People do this all the time. Resume padding, for example.

Sometimes it’s better for the business to have two sloppy PRs than a single perfect one. You should be able to deliver that way when the situation demands.

Second, no one is out there proving anything. Like formal software correctness proofs? Yeah nobody does that. We use a variety of techniques like testing and code review to try to avoid shipping bugs, but there’s always a trade off between quality and speed/cost. You’re never actually 100% certain software works. You can buy more nines but they get expensive. We find bugs in 20+ year old software.

bluesnowmonkey commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

Rperry2174 · 3 days ago

Im not fully convinced by "a computer can never be held accountable"

We already delegate accountability to non-humans all the time: - CI systems block merges - monitoring systems page people - test suites gate different things

In practice accountability is enforced by systems, not humans.. humans are defintiely "blamed" after the fact, but the day-to-day control loop is automated.

As agents get better at running code, inspecting ui state, correlating logs, screenshots, etc they're starting to operationally be "accountable" and preventing bad changes from shipping and producing evidence when something goes wrong .

At some point humans role shifts from "i personally verify this works" to "i trust this verification system and am accountable for configuring it correctly".

Thats still responsibility, but kind of different from whats described here. Taken to a logical extreme, the arguement here would suggest that CI shouldn't replace manual release checklists

bluesnowmonkey · 3 days ago

Humans are only kind of held accountable. If you ship a bug do you go to jail? Even a bug so bad it puts your company out of business. Would there be any legal or physical or monetary consequences at all for you, besides you lose your job?

So the accountability situation for AI seems not that different. You can fire it. Exactly the same as for humans.

bluesnowmonkey commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

WesleyJohnson · 12 days ago

So you're openly saying you're fine with quantity over quality.... in software engineering? That's fine for a MVP, maybe, but nothing beyond on that IMHO unless they're throw away scripts.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"Yeah, but we did it in a 10th of the time"

bluesnowmonkey · 11 days ago

Of course it's fine for any project.

There is exactly one "best" programmer in the world, and at this moment he/she is working on at most one project. Every other project in the world is accepting less than the "best" possible quality. Yes... in software engineering.

As soon as you sat down at the keyboard this morning, your employer accepted a sacrifice in quality for the sake of quantity. So did mine. Because neither one of us is the best. They could have hired someone better but they hired you and they're fine with that. They'd rather have the code you produce today than not have it.

It's the same for an AI. It could produce some code for you, right now, for nearly free. Would you rather have that code or not have it? It depends on the situation, yeah not always but sometimes it's worth having.

bluesnowmonkey commented on Everyone in Seattle hates AI jonready.com/blog/posts/e... · Posted by u/mips_avatar

afavour · 17 days ago

IMO if the market is going to punish anyone it’s the people who, today, find that AI is able to do all their coding for them.

The skeptics are the ones that have tried AI coding agents and come away unimpressed because it can’t do what they do. If you’re proudly proclaiming that AI can replace your work then you’re telling on yourself.

bluesnowmonkey · 16 days ago

> it can’t do what they do

That's asking the wrong question, and I suspect coming from a place of defensiveness, looking to justify one's own existence. "Is there anything I can do that the machine can't?" is the wrong question. "How can I do more with the machine's help?" is the right one.

bluesnowmonkey commented on Solarpunk is happening in Africa climatedrift.substack.com... · Posted by u/JoiDegn

tomalbrc · 2 months ago

> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.

Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.

Why are you lying about this, its clearly written by an LLM

bluesnowmonkey · a month ago

Agreed it clearly is.

bluesnowmonkey commented on After the AI boom: what might we be left with? blog.robbowley.net/2025/1... · Posted by u/imasl42

zirror · 2 months ago

But you need to verify everything unless it’s self evident. The number of times CoPilot (Sonnett 4) still hallucinates Browser APIs is astonishing. Imaging trying to learn something that can’t be checked easily, like Egyptian archeology or something.

bluesnowmonkey · 2 months ago

You have to verify everything from human developers too. They hallucinate APIs when they try to write code from memory. So we have:

  - documentation
  - design reviews
  - type systems
  - code review
  - unit tests
  - continuous integration
  - integration testing
  - Q&A process
  - etc.

It turns out when include all these processes, teams of error-prone human developers can produce complex working software. Mostly -- sometimes there are bugs. Kind of a lot actually. But we get things done.

Is it not the same with AI? With the right processes you can get consistent results from inconsistent tools.

bluesnowmonkey commented on Show HN: Small Transfers – charge from 0.000001 USD per request for your SaaS smalltransfers.com/... · Posted by u/strnisa

ed · 3 months ago

I mean this in the most constructive way possible: why do you think this idea hasn’t worked before, when it’s been fairly obvious and easy to build for a long time? And what’s your fix for that issue? You present the merchant side of things, but not the customer side which is more important to me, as a potential Small transfers adopter. What’s customer conversion like? Are micropayments actually better than typical payment amounts? Based on my experience I’d expect the conversion rate of a $0.01 and $1 fee to be pretty similar. The friction of inputting a credit card and trusting a service is way higher than the actual payment amount. I’d also have to introduce 2 more services to my customers: Small transfers powered by stripe, and customers would have to fund an account that realistically speaking can’t be used anywhere other than my site. Just offering some questions to think about!

bluesnowmonkey · 3 months ago

Micropayments introduced too much friction for you, a human. You have to think about how much the thing is worth, and consider whether the merchant is trustworthy, and enter your details to perform the transaction. Maybe you’re unsatisfied and want a refund.

Say it costs 1.7 cents and delivers 3.2 cents of “value”, you need to be able to do all that work in less than 1.5 cents worth of your time. You can’t do that as a human. But an agent maybe could, to pay for content or MCP calls. I see a big role for micropayments in this genetic future.