dwheeler (u/dwheeler)

dwheeler commented on AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust spectrum.ieee.org/ai-for-... · Posted by u/WolfOliver

dwheeler · 3 days ago

I don't like the phrase "real coder". It's not clear what it means.

I really like the word "assistant" for what we have today. The AI code assistant tools available today, like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, can't replace humans in doing software development. Not even close. But they are often useful to human developers, and today, that's the more important measure.

I've been spending time with various AI tools, especially Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. They're amazing one minute, and they make bone-headedly bad recommendations the next. It takes effort to learn how to create good prompts, and if you want the results to be good, you have to review and critique the results. I'm particularly concerned about security. They're definitely happy to write insecure code. If you know what you're doing, prompt them well, and review their results, you can get good results.

I don't know if they'll ever reach "full autonomy". They don't need to get there to be useful.

dwheeler commented on The current state of LLM-driven development blog.tolki.dev/posts/2025... · Posted by u/Signez

dwheeler · 23 days ago

> Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment.

I'm sprry, but I disagree with this claim. That is not my experience, nor many others. It's true that you can make them do something without learning anything. However, it takes time to learn what they are good amd bad at, what information they need, and what nonsense they'll do without express guidance. It also takes time to know what to look for when reviewing results.

I also find that they work fine for languages without static types. You need need tests, yes, but you need them anyway.

dwheeler commented on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible news.uscg.mil/Press-Relea... · Posted by u/rwmj

post_break · a month ago

The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive, he could have made another hull, and he could be taking more trips down there for better of for worse. The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

dwheeler · a month ago

> The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive...

I disagree. In fact, I think that's quite unlikely.

First, unlike a metal hull, carbon fiber hulls accumulate subtle damage on compression that's hard to detect. Then, when they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically. So "this hull worked before" isn't evidence of success in this case, as it normally would be, it's evidence that you're getting closer & closer to the disaster.

Second, I think Stockton would have just kept diving, even if this event hadn't failed. He might have even gotten more reckless (though per the report he was already extremely reckless). If you keep playing Russian Roulette, and occasionally add another bullet, eventually the game will end. There is no evidence he was going to stop until he was killed by his own decisions.

None of this takes away the tragedy of it. It's sad, and will remain so.

dwheeler commented on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible news.uscg.mil/Press-Relea... · Posted by u/rwmj

dwheeler · a month ago

The report has many gems about the tragedy. Basically, there were clear physical causes, which in turn were caused by hubris:

PHYSICAL CAUSES

"4.2.4.4. American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) Classification Society Background" ... "The ABS Underwater Rules do not permit the use of carbon fiber composites for Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (PVHOs)"

"4.2.4.5. Det Norske Veritas and Germanischer Lloyd (DNV GL)" ... 4.2.4.5.3. According to a DNV Surveyor, carbon fiber has not been accepted as suitable material for the construction of submersible PVHOs, especially when subject to external pressure experienced at ocean depths. According to DNV GL, carbon fibers are not considered suitable for significant compressive loading conditions."

"5.1. Inadequacy of Structural Engineering Analysis. OceanGate’s TITAN submersible design was a complex, high-risk, deep-sea submersible. The design and testing processes for TITAN did not adequately address many of the fundamental engineering principles that are considered crucial for ensuring safety and reliability for operations in such an inherently hazardous environment..."

"5.6 Insufficient Understanding of Carbon Fiber Material Properties for Deep-Sea Application. The TITAN’s pressure hull was constructed using carbon fiber, a material chosen by Mr. Rush for its “impressive” strength-to-weight ratio. [However] the use of carbon fiber in deep-sea environments remains unproven—unlike the materials with established safety records. There are currently no recognized national or international standards that approve of the use of carbon fiber pressure hulls for submersibles. Carbon fiber has demonstrated its effectiveness in other applications where the material is primarily under tension (e.g., aircraft hulls where the pressure inside the passenger compartment is pressing outwards). However, in deep-sea conditions, the pressure hull experiences extreme compressive forces, a scenario for which carbon fiber has no established track record and is generally understood to be less effective."

* * *

HUMAN DECISIONS

The physics is just the physics. There was no law of nature that forced them to take the steps they took. Instead, we have points like these:

"5.12. OceanGate’s Toxic Safety Culture. OceanGate’s operational and safety practices were critically flawed, which contributed to the catastrophic implosion of the TITAN submersible. At the core of these failures was a disconnect between the company's stated safety protocols and its actual practices. ... This highlighted systemic issues where submersible safety protocols were either egregiously inadequate or willfully disregarded, leaving critical risks unmitigated. The analysis reveals a disturbing pattern of misrepresentation and reckless disregard for safety in OceanGate's operation of the TITAN submersible, with Mr. Rush seemingly using inflated numbers to bolster the perceived safety and dive count of the final TITAN hull...

Examples of OceanGate CEO’s disdain for traditional submersible safety protocols were abundant. For example... This dismissive approach to safety culture was not limited to engineering decisions. OceanGate’s management actively retaliated against employees who raised legitimate compliance related concerns..."

This was a tragedy, because people died and this was all completely avoidable. It's the only event like this in many, many decades. I hope others will leran and avoid making similar mistakes.

dwheeler commented on US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible news.uscg.mil/Press-Relea... · Posted by u/rwmj

dwheeler · a month ago

James Cameron gave an interview that did a great job explaining the problems. In particular, carbon fiber is great for planes, but a terrible idea for compressive forces like going deep underwater. See: "James Cameron on the OceanGate sub disaster" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwSaZfwBrz8

dwheeler commented on UN report finds UN reports are not widely read reuters.com/world/un-repo... · Posted by u/anjneymidha

dwheeler · a month ago

I'm not sure how much this matters. They should measure impact, not reader count.

Many reports are written for a narrow audience. That's fine if it provides key information necessary to make a good decision with wide impact.

dwheeler commented on Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE dgl.cx/2025/07/git-clone-... · Posted by u/dgl

layer8 · 2 months ago

You can get similar vulnerabilities with Unicode normalization, with mismatched code pages/character encodings, or, as the article points out, with a case-insensitive file system. That's not to say that control characters should be allowed in file names, but there's an inherent risk whenever byte sequences are being decoded or normalized into something else.

dwheeler · 2 months ago

Not to the same degree, though, and the arguments for status quo are especially weak. There are reasonable arguments pro and con case-insensitive filenames. Character encoding issues are dwindling, since most systems just use utf-8 for filename encoding (as there is no mechanism for indicating the encoding of each specific filename), and using utf-8 consistently in filenames supports filenames in arbitrary languages.

Control characters in filenames have no obviously valuable use case, they appear to be allowed only because "it's always been allowed". That is not a strong argument for them. Some systems do not allow them, with no obvious ill effects.

dwheeler commented on Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE dgl.cx/2025/07/git-clone-... · Posted by u/dgl

dwheeler · 2 months ago

Ah yes, yet ANOTHER vulnerability caused because Linux and most Unixes allow control characters in filenames. This ability's primary purpose appears to be to enable attacks and to make it significantly more difficult to write correct code. For example, you're not supposed to exchange filenames a line at a time, since filenames can contain newlines.

See my discussion here: https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html

One piece of good news: POSIX recently added xargs -0 and find -print0, making it a little easier to portably handle such filenames. Still, it's a pain.

I plan to complete my "safename" Linux module I started years ago. When enabled, it prevents creating filenames in certain cases such as those with control characters. It won't prevent all problems, but it's a decent hardening mechanism that prevents problems in many cases.

dwheeler commented on Building the Rust Compiler with GCC fractalfir.github.io/gene... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dwheeler · 2 months ago

It may not seem like it, but this is impressive progress. Getting a compiler to bootstrap at all is an accomplishment, especially for Rust since that depends on so many things working. Once it can reliably bootstrap, a lot of performance-improving steps can begin. Congrats!

dwheeler commented on Open source can't coordinate? matklad.github.io/2025/05... · Posted by u/LorenDB

mongol · 2 months ago

> But there was no one to coordinate Linux on desktop.

Freedesktop.org?

dwheeler · 2 months ago

Yes. GNOME and KDE at least coordinate via freedesktop.org. At least they did!