732
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
732 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
86387 readers
3554 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wide scoping like that rarely ends well. Give it the list, tell it to spin a new agent for every single issue and operate on them separately. If any of those agents run out of context memory, it will just shit the bed. Clarify that you need the test to actually work and not be commented out, and that the tests themselves still need to be viable and indicate a healthy working app, not just report that it's healthy. Trying to get tests happy in AI is like making wishes on a monkey's paw. Then assign someone to look after it because that bastard will chew through 10's of thousands of dollars to fix a laundry list of tests, which in my dev experience will be all broken and ignored in 2-3 minor releases.
You can generally get it to do things, even somewhat complicated things, but it's not easy, and the shit it gives you back while you're trying to convince it to do the job is the same stuff you'd fire an employee over.
My favorite thing is to make it make ansible tools, They're easy to read, easy to lock down, keys and passwords go in a vault that it's forbidden to read. Then I have it write runbooks on how to operate the playbooks. I then make an index of runbooks, and ask it to do them. It's an ansible job, so I can read it easily and make sure it's not able to delete my drive or my production database.
If I lose access to cheap tokens, everything I've making is still usable, and for now, I can spend my time working on stuff that's not simple enough that it can handle it well.