I had to google “clanker”.

You need to understand the system you're working on enough to make well-informed decisions about its current and future states.

In some cases you can get away with not reading the code. And maybe in the future that will be more common. But for now, I personally prefer to read (or skim) the code, and not abdicate to AI.

Informative thought process here. Pre-committing benchmarks to measure real efficiency gains might have helped, but hands-off complex rewrites are still not shovel ready.

I dunno. You still have to test, but in my experience if I noticed unreliability during high load I could just tell Claude "I noticed unreliability during high load" and it would easily have set up a high load benchmark, discovered this broadcast channel issue and fixed it.

It definitely improves the results if you do think but I don't think "you still have to think" is a safe space that's going to save us from unemployment.

I dread for the future where "you have to think" is considered a controversial statement.

This post resonates a lot with me and my day-to-day efforts to help keep the spinning plates that are our software systems from toppling.

Speaking of trade-offs, I want to keep pulling the thread: is it worth reading—meaning, understanding—the code in order to prevent p95 latency from skyrocketing, preventing OOM death, and keeping our apps reliable for customers?

The cost of understanding the code is ostensibly very high relative to just using a clanker (citation needed), so does paying that cost translate to value—what is it worth? Concretely, if vibe coding increases bugs and enshittification, but decreases spending without decreasing revenue (read: customers suffer, but they don't leave), do we still need to pay the cost of reading code? Is it better to invest in stickiness, lobbying, and market capture?

I hope this comment isn't read as advocating for this; it's more of a thought experiment about pragmatism and trade-offs. I know that I personally care a lot about understanding the code, and I believe I'm paid to do exactly that (I very much enjoy understanding code, so I may be biased in this). Inside of SaaS-land and outside of critical safety systems, we've seen production databases destroyed, personal data leaked, platforms unwittingly exploited, and UX bugs creep into our operating systems, and yet the companies involved keep on keeping on. Is thinking going to increase their shareholder value?

It's worth noting that the context here is a system that was translated by an LLM which is the ideal use case for it. 90% of the thinking had already been done by developers of the existing system.

This article just reminds me that workslop is so hard to counter because it takes no effort to produce and immense effort to debunk