An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story(tobru.ch) |
An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story(tobru.ch) |
Interesting how unquestioning the responses are that this isn’t engagement bait
I might be biased by my experience, because we actually cared about GDPR and AI act and proper medical data processing, and I've spent my fair share of time investigating the options that exist. Still, I'm struggling to imagine how one could possibly screw it up anywhere near as what the article described. Like, I can't think of a way to do it, to the point I might need to ask an LLM to explain it to me.
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[0] - Not as a means of developing an actual product, but solely to see if we can, plus it was easier to discuss product ideas while having some prototypes to click around.
unless cybersecurity is such a dynamic practice that we can't create automated processes that are secured
Essentially a question of what can be done to make vibecoding "secure enough"
Lets really hope they learned from their mistakes
https://www.myvibesite.com/?id=10; DROP TABLE customer;--I wonder if it is an actual dunning kruger effect at play here (confidence issue) or the lack of critical thinking. The first one could be excused somewhat, but I am afraid it is more of the second one
AI companies realized that all this vibe coding has released a shitstorm of security vulnerabilities into the wild and so unless they release a much better model to fix that mess they’ll be found out and nobody will touch AI coding with a 100ft pole for the next 15 years. This article points more towards this narrative.
I created a GCP project (my-app-dev) for exploring how to scale up the cloud service. I added several resources to mock the production, like compute instances/cloud SQL/etc, then populated the data and run several benchmarks.
I changed the specs, number of instances and replicas, and configs through gcloud command.
$ gcloud compute instances stop instance-1 --project=my-app-dev
$ gcloud compute instances set-machine-type instance-1 --machine-type=c3-highcpu-176 --project=my-app-dev
$ gcloud sql instances patch db-1 --tier=db-custom-32-131072 --project=my-app-dev
$ gcloud projects list
PROJECT_ID NAME PROJECT_NUMBER
my-app-test my app 123456789012
my-app-dev my app 234567890123 <- the dev project I was working on
my-app my app 345678901234 <- the production (I know it's a bad name)
Of course I checked every commands. I couldn't YOLO while working on cloud resources, even in dev environment. But I focused on the subommands and its content and didn't even think it had changed the project ID along the way.
It continued to suggest more and more aggressive commands for testing, and I approved them brain-deadly...
$ gcloud sql instances patch db-1 --database-flags=max_connections=500 --project=my-app
$ gcloud compute instances delete instance-1 --project=my-app
$ echo 'DELETE FROM users WHERE username="test";' \
| gcloud sql connect my-db
--user=user --database=my-db --project=my-app
$ wrk -t4 -c200 -d30s \
"http://$(gcloud compute instances describe instance-1 \
--project=my-app \
--format='get(networkInterfaces[0].accessConfigs[0].natIP)')"
Fortunately, it didn't do anything irreversible. But it was one of the most terrifying moments in my career.
Several years ago ran into one american company which consulted with me. They had 4000 paying customers and they rolled out their billing solution which accept crypto, paypal and stripe.
They had problem with payment going missing, i migrated them to WHMCs with hardening and they never had any issues after.
Now people may laugh at whmcs but use the right tool for job
U need battle tested billing solution then whmcs does count it can support VAT, taxes, reporting/accounting and pretty all which you'll error while you try to do it all yourself.
Too bad there aren't battle tested opensource solution for this
I don't think solving this is all that complicated, at least for now. It isn't like it's currently difficult to tell what is and isn't LLM word salad, though that will likely change in the future, but by then the argument will involve whether it really matters or not. But for now, when 80% of the submissions are LLM garbage and it really is garbage, it's pretty jarring.
There's a hype machine working and lots of people riding on it.
Lack of security theater is a good thing for most businesses
I’m not even sure what your last comment means, are you contending that it is a good thing this company violated multiple laws with sensitive patient data?
AI does the same thing an agency or dev would do. Those vibe coding platforms have a template for these things which is usually Vite + React with Supabase for the backend, the same as a dev might use because surprise the LLM trained on the dev's work.
OP's point is that you're not guaranteed a good outcome hiring an agency or solo dev either, in fact I would say you're almost guaranteed a bad outcome either way.
> All "access control" logic lived in the JavaScript on the client side, meaning the data was literally one curl command away from anyone who looked.
They are not the same thing.
In this case the "client" is fully liable for the security issues.
1. Only be allowed via CI/CD
2. All infra should be defined as code
3. Any deployment to production should be a delayed process that also has a human-approval step in the workflow (at least one, if not more)
(Exactly where that review step is placed depends on your organisation - culture, size, etc.)
And anyone that does need to touch production should do so from an isolated VM with temporary credentials. Developers shouldn't routinely have production access from their terminal. This last aspect is easy and cheap to set up on AWS. I presume it's also possible in Google Cloud.
For the rest of us it is about being put under pressure by managers who don't understand whether to believe what you say or what they read about vibe coding on some linked-in post. As far as they are concerned you're not the authority and some hype-ster is.
Then that's lack of due diligence and and any manager is forcing you to ignore that, you should report them to compliance team. You cannot blame everyone else and bear no responsibility for your actions. If you decide to vibe code blindly and ignore all the laws and standards, then that was your decision and you decided to turn a blind eye.
They watch your AI usage and pressure you to use more. They tell you that "of course you must check the code" but of course if you do then they can start telling you your performance isn't good enough. "Fred is much faster than you" and of course Fred says he checks everything but does he really? To do code reviews he just uses an AI anyhow so nobody catches what the AI doesn't catch. If you check his code carefully in a review and bring up a lot of questions (which he cannot answer because he doesn't know) then you're being "difficult" and dragging the team down.
Is this what I'm experiencing now? perhaps about 70% of it but I can see how it goes. There are lots of companies out there with poor development practices who think that AI will save them. They don't want to prioritise "quality" although they shout about this a lot. They think that somehow they don't deserve to have quality issues if they prioritise speed and features and don't bother to fix any problem until it causes downtime.
Please forgive my cynical view. I have simply had some bad experiences. It's not always easy to do what is right even when it's fully in the company's own best interest.
Fred now generates 5,000 lines of horse-dung that appears to work and management are gob-smacked. It is extremely fragile, has no security and the tests are all autogenerated so nobody knows if they're even testing what is actually important but...
Above the team-lead level, management, product manager etc have no idea what's inside a piece of work that makes it maintainable or secure or anything else and all they see is their idea realised and the person who did it has a golden halo so you cannot say a single negative thing about the work without a tonne of shit pouring on you.
This has happened to me. It was in the days when ChatGPT was much worse than it is now and the code was almost one big hallucination - indescribable how bad it was. The only advantage I had was that the whole team, other than Fred of course, rejected the PR. It caused a world of horrible problems though and incredible behavior from "Fred" and yet he was able to get away with it until he finally stepped so far over the line that nobody could support him. It caused other team members to leave though so it was a disaster.
I sent them an email and they threatened to sue me. I was a bit in shock from such dumb response, but I guess some people only learn the hard way, so I filed a report to the AEPD (Data protection agency in Spain) for starters, known to be brutal.
I've also sent them a burofax demanding the removal of my data on their systems just last friday.
I joined an open network and it turned out to be a law firm. All their computers were on a Samba network with full C: drives shared. I wrote README.txt files on their drives telling them about the issue, but after some time it was still the same.
Then I went directly to the place to talk to them and also with the idea I could land my first job fixing that mess. But... They got incredibly angry with me, since they claimed they had some very good and expensive contractors taking care of their computers and network, and that I had basically broken in.
I left the place quickly...
But one thing they hadn't locked doll wn, was installing extensions in Safari, and given I had some development chops from coding a bunch in my freetime, I saw the opportunity to write a tiny extension that saved me a ton of time by merely copy-pasting stuff into the right forms and so on. Basically making the whole thing more efficient for me.
Everything was great, until the person next to me saw I had something different. Cautiously eager, I let them try the extension too, they loved it, and without thinking about it, spread it to other people in our team. Eventually, the manager and the IT team picked up what was going on, said they'investigate if I could maybe start doing those kind of things full-time instead of being a support agent, and just focus on tooling.
Fast forward two weeks, I get called into a meeting, apparently someone in the company had been "stealing" CC numbers from the customers on the calls, and since they don't think they've found the right person who did it (or something like that), the person who was known for "doing stuff to the computers" was the next possible suspect, and they fired me right there.
Eventually this firing let me find my first actual programming job, so I'm not too mad about it, but it really shows how out of touch lots of companies and people are when it comes to how computers actually work.
Nice. I wish more countries had something like that. Many of these organizations are lethargic and have to be forced into action by civilian efforts or the press.
France's CNIL is also not bad. They are particularly hard against things like "you accidentally sign up for x y z services when only wanting to sign up to service A".
Gdpr in the EU is also miles ahead of what the US has, or at least what it has been enforcing for a long time.
Only when they start to side with the people, actually fining business billions and billions will things start to change. I hope we'll see this happen in europe at large, and not only in a few countries.
I have a feeling that next year's theme will be security. People have turned off their brain when it comes to tech.
I am part of a forum with many small business owners. One particular owner has been gung-ho about how he built his entire business app using vibe coding. And my first reaction was - All the power to him. It’s his business and he is free to do so.
But then came the question of data privacy rules and he had no clue. This was concerning because the impact went beyond his business. His response when the oversight was pointed out to him was that being ignorant of the law was enough to save him. Still he went to one of the vibe coding Reddit subs to get help. Then came back fuming because devs on Reddit asked him to hire real developers. He believes that these developers are delusional and a dying breed and AI is so ahead that developers are going to be dead in a years time.
I think that having paper documentation will be safer very soon :)
It is just a matter of time when something really really bad happens.
Compared to that vibe coding has no such qualities.
The dinosaurs of the before-LLM age will increasingly struggle to convince young people e.g. to seek competent medical consultation, because ChatGPT can do that much better (it's always supportive, available at any hour, meets you where you are...) -- this aspect alone is bound to have a death toll associated with it.
Or imagine asking ChatGPT to map an Alpine climbing route, -- anything with a bad failure mode.
It kinda falls apart once you get past a few thousand lines of code... and real systems aren't just big, they're actually messy...shit loads of components, services, edge cases, things breaking in weird ways. Getting all of that to work together reliably is a different game altogether.
And you still need solid software engineering fundamentals. Without understanding architecture, debugging, tradeoffs, and failure modes, it's hard to guide or even evaluate what's being generated.
Vibe-coding feels great for prototypes, hobby projects, or just messing around, or even some internal tools in a handful of cases. But for actual production systems, you still need real engineering behind it.
As of now, I'm 100% hesitant to pay for, or put my data on systems that are vibe-coded without the knowledge of what's been built and how it's been built.
The quick fix was a simple, empty index.html file (or setting the -Indexes option in the apache config). The surgeon had no idea what this meant or why it was important. And the AI bots didn't either.
The odd part of this to me was that the AI had made good choices (strong password hashes, reasonable DB schema, etc.) and the app itself worked well. Honestly, it was impressive. But at the same time, they made some very basic deployment/security mistakes that were trivial. They just needed a bit of guidance from an experienced devops security guy to make it Internet worthy, but no one bothered to do that.
Edit: I do not recommend backing up web apps on the web server itself. That's another basic mistake. But they (or the AI) decided to do that and no one with experience was consulted.
This is the top!
This is a typical example of someone using Coding Agents without being a developer: AI that isn't used knowingly can be a huge risk if you don't know what you're doing.
AI used for professional purposes (not experiments) should NOT be used haphazardly.
And this also opens up a serious liability issue: the developer has the perception of being exempt from responsibility and this also leads to enormous risks for the business.
Claude, opencode etc. Are brute force coding harnesses that literally use bash tools plus a whole bunch of vague prompting (skills, AGENT.md, MCP and all that stuff) to nudge them probabilistically into desirable behavior.
Without engineering specialized harnesses that control workflows and validate output, this issue won‘t go away.
We‘re in the wild west phase of LLM usage now, where problems emerge that shouldn’t exist in the first place and are being solved at the entirely wrong layer (outside of the harness) or with the entirely wrong tools (prompts).
Gone should be the days of “I taught myself so now I can [design software in a professional setting / design a bridge in a professional setting].” I’m not advocating gatekeeping - if you want to build a small bridge at the end of your garden for personal use, go for it. If you want to build a bridge in your local town over a river, you’re gonna need professional accreditation. Same should be true for software engineering now.
> Welcome to VibeToolX.
> By pressing Confirm you accept all responsibility for user data stewardship as regulated in every country where your users reside.
Would that be scary enough to nudge some risk analysis on the user's part? I am sure that would drop adoption by a lot, so I don't see it happening voluntarily.
My first office job was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil and Structural engineering firm. I saw how seriously real engineering is taken.
When I brought up your argument to my FAANG employed sibling, he said "well, what would it take to be a real software engineer in your mind!??"
My response was, and always will be: "When there is a path to a software Professional Engineer stamp, with the engineer's name on it, which carries legal liability for gross negligence, then I will call them Software Engineers."
Typically arguments come up:
“that’s gatekeeping” - yes, for good reason!
“Laws already exist” - yeah, and that’s not the same as professional accreditation, standards and codes of practice! Different thing, different purpose. Also the laws are a mishmash and not fit for purpose in most sectors.
Avoiding such low-hanging-fruit disasters is doable and major players have incentives to fix it.
This however wouldn't change the goal - replace all software engineers with DIY nephews with LLM in their hands.
Even worse - people start thinking it's infeasible to learn hard things, because it prevents you from moving fast, from one domain to another.
My area of expertise is cryptography-adjacent. Non-trivial fraction of students think that cryptography and security is a dead-end skill as all companies in this area are being replaced with AI. I asked them to implement web-bot-auth as simple as possible, because I know how AI can read specification and follow it.
If I don't have disciplines or principles, or if I am just technically incompetent, its suggestions would sound so reasonable.
There are going to be a lot of accidents like this because it's just really easy to do. And some people are inevitably going to do silly things.
But it's not that different from people doing stupid things with Visual Basic back in the day. Or responding to friendly worded emails with the subject "I love you". Putting CDs/USB drives in work PCs with viruses, worms, etc.
That's what people do when you give the useful tools with sharp edges.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260331184500/https://www.tobru...
Edit: the archive.ph one works for me :)
It's reminiscent of the 90s, where every middle manager had dragged and dropped some boxes on some forms, and could get a salesman to sell it, without a care in the world for what was going on behind the scenes.
Until something crashed and recovery was needed, of course.
The piper always needs to be paid.
It sorta should do this anyway given that the user intent probably wasn’t to dump everyone’s data into Firebase or whatever.
I personally would like this as well since it gets tiring specifying all the guardrails and double-checking myself. Using this stuff feels too much like developing a skill I shouldn’t need while not focusing on real user problems.
Vibe coding is just a bad idea, unless you’re willing and able to vet the output, which most people doing it are not.
In these cases you don’t necessarily care too much about the code itself, as long as it looks reasonable at a glance.
It says quite a lot about where we are with ai tooling that none of the big players have “no need to review, certified for market X” offerings yet.
Someone with the right mindset needs to be there providing guidance and architectural input.
And even then that's not enough. Something like a super extensive testing set like in SQLite is the best we can do.
Otherwise, you endup simulating the production. Lot of the non technical folks building products with AI Vibe coding are basically building Product Simulations. It looks like a product, functions like a product but behind the scene, you can poke holes.
Does the company which willingly sells the polymorphic virus editor bear any responsibility, or should the unaware vibe coder be incumbent ?
AI is a tool. It’s not intelligent, and it works at a much bigger scale than bricks and mortar, but it’s still just a tool. There’s lots we can blame AI companies for, but abuse of the tool isn’t a clear-cut situation. We should blame them for misleading marketing. But we should also blame users (who are often highly intelligent - eg doctors) for using it outside their ability. Much like doctors are fed up of patients using AI to try to act like doctors, software engineers are now finding out what it’s like when clients try to use AI to act like software engineers.
This is going to get more common (state sponsored hackers are going to have a field day)
(In not a lawyer and so I might be mistaken about this; Especially the level of intentionality might be a factor)
The thing I have found that makes things work much better is, wait for it... Jira.
Everyone loves to hate on Jira, but it is a mature platform for managing large projects.
First, I use the Jira Rovo MCP (or cli, I don't wanna argue about that) to have Claude Code plan and document my architecture, features, etc. I then manually review and edit all of these items. Then, in a clean session, or many, have it implement, document decisions in comments etc. Everything works so much more reliably for large-ish projects like this.
When I first started doing this in my solo projects it was a major, "well, yeah, duh," moment. You wouldn't ask a human dev to magically have an entire project in their mind, why ask a coding agent to do that? This mental model has really helped me use the tools correctly.
edit: then there is context window management. I use Opus 4.6 1M all the time, but if I get much past 250k usage, that means I have done a poor job in starting new sessions. I never hit the auto-compact state. It is a universal truth that LLMs get dumb the more context you give them.
I think everyone should implement the context status bar config to keep an eye on usage:
And small quality stuff. Just yesterday it used a static method where a class method was optimal. A lot of very small stuff I used to call my juniors on during reviews.
On another hand, it used an elegant trick to make the code more readable, but failed to use the same trick elsewhere for no reason. I'm not saying it's bad: I probably wouldn't have thought about it by myself, and kept the worse solution. But even when Claude is smarter than I am, I still have to overview it.
(All the discourse around AI did wonder for my imposter syndrome though)
Most people run into problems (with or without AI) when they write code without knowing what they're trying to create. Sometimes that's useful and fun and even necessary, to explore a problem space or toy with ideas. But eventually you have to settle on a design and implement it - or just end up with an unmaintainable mess of code (whether it's pure-human or AI-assisted mess doesn't matter lol).
Not to mention that these prototypes and samples all turn out more or less the same. Obviously, given how LLMs work. Like LLM prose, LLM-generated web apps have a distinctive, samey look and feel.
They got the application right, and began stumbling with the integration - created a developer account, got the API key, but in place of the applications URL, the had input “localhost:5345” and couldn’t get that to work, so they gave up. They never asked the tech team what was wrong, never figured out that they needed to host the application. Some of the fundamental computer literacy is the missing piece here.
I think (maybe hopeful) people will either level up to the point where they understand that stuff, or they will just give up. Also possible that the tools get good enough to explain that stuff, so they don’t have to. But tech is wide and deep and not having an understanding of the basic systems is… IMO making it a non-starter for certain things.
A simple "I'm a professional surgeon, but sadly know nothing about making software" would definitely make the conversation play out differently. How? Needs to be seen. But in an idealized scenario (which could easily become real if models are trained for it), the model would coach the (self-stated) non-expert users on the topics it would ordinarily assume the (implicitly self-stated) expert already knows.
Disabling auto-indexing just makes it harder to spot the issue. (To clarify, also not a bad idea in principle, just not _the_ solution.) If the file is still there and can be downloaded, that's strictly something which should not be possible in the first place.
How I see it happening: agents like CC have in built skills for deployment and uses building blocks from either AWS or other simpler providers. Payment through OAuth and seamless checkout.
This should be standardised
We already have laws in place, and certifications that help someone understand if a given organization adheres to given standards. We can argue over their validity, efficacy, or value.
The infrastructure, laws, and framework exist for this. More regulation and beaurocracy doesn't help when current state isn't enforced.
In most of those professions, it is a crime or a civil violation to offer services without the proper qualifications, experience and accreditation from one of the appropriate professional bodies.
We DO NOT have this in software engineering. At all. Anyone can teach themselves a bit of coding and start using it in their professional life.
Analogous to law, you can draft a contract by yourself, but if it goes wrong you have a major headache. You cannot, however, offer services as a solicitor without proper qualifications and accreditation (at least in the UK). Yet in software engineering, not only can we teach ourselves and then write small bits of software for ourselves, we can then offer professional services with no further barriers or steps.
The mishmash of laws we have around data and privacy are not professional standards, nor are they accreditation. We don’t have the framework or laws around this. And I am not aware of the USA (federal level) or Europe (or member states) or China or Russia or India or etc having this.
For example, the BCS in the UK is so weak that although it exists, exceedingly few professional software engineers are even registered with them. They have no teeth. There’s no laws covering any of this stuff. Just good-ol’ GDPR and some sector-specific laws here and there trying to keep people mildly safe.
Should be the same everywhere. Anyone can be a coder, but not everyone is an engineer
High profile convictions are not a good way of dealing with this. Not in the short or long term. Sure they have an impact, and laws should be enforced, but that’s not a substitute for managing the industry properly.
The way I see it, if they didn't even realize that they are doing something they shouldn't, they wouldn't have even known they need accreditation, even if that was required. Unless we restricted access to gazillions of tools without it of course.
I think it'll work itself out over time as what AI is/isn't and what data privacy means is discussed more. I'd leave accreditation entirely out of it, because we cannot even agree on what are the actual best practices or if they matter.
Doesn't help much, accounting needs accreditation and standards, but that doesn't prevent competition level of some 100 accountants per job. Only way you prevent that is by limiting numbers, like lawyers do, case when connections and nepotism matter, you basically get a hereditary aristocratic caste.
I guess we better get used to going back being peasants working shit jobs barely above starvation since that's what the future of capitalism seems to bring: https://realityraiders.com/fringewalker/irreverent-humor/mon...
I mean, people could voluntarily try to create rules of thumb they think are valuable and could try to popularize them
I don't think that requires further restrictive actions
But in any case it's so lacking in detail and so brief as to make it so uninteresting that it might as well be fake.
> Somebody "vibecodes" medical app/system. The app was insecure. Personal info leaked.
Okay cool.
You hear too much about people being persecuted for trying to point out security vulnerabilities. (Guess they haven't heard about "don't shoot the messenger").
(It turned out fine after finally managing to speak with someone. Had to ring up customer service and say "look, here are the last digits of your stripe private key. Please speak with an engineer". Figuring out how to talk with someone was the difficult thing)
The timelines mentioned are weird - he spoke to them before they built it? Or after? It's not that clear, he mentions they mentioned watching a video.
> The entire application was a single HTML file with all JavaScript, CSS, and structure written inline.
This is not my experience of how agents tend to build at all. I often _ask_ them to do that, but their tendency is to use a lot of files and structure
> They even added a feature to record conversations during appointments
So they have the front-desk laptop in the doctor's room? Or they were recording conversations anyway and now they for feed them into the system afterwards?
> All "access control" logic lived in the JavaScript on the client side, meaning the data was literally one curl command away from anyone who looked.
Also definitely not the normal way an agent would build something - security flaws yes, but this sounds more like someone who just learnt coding or the most upvoted post of all time on r/programmerhorror, not really AI.
Overall I'm skeptical of the claims made in this article until I see stronger evidence (not that I'm supporting using slop for a medical system in general).
> Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.
Then this claim seems a bit too much, since what could have gone more wrong is malicious actors discovering it, right? Did they?
Maybe I have trouble believing that a medical professional could be that careless and naive in such a way, but anything could happen.
I guess another thought is... If they built it why would they share the URL to the author? Was author like "Ooh cool, let me check that out", and they just gave the url without auth? Because if it worked as it was supposed to it should have just shown a login screen right? That's the weirdest part to me, I suppose.
I took that all to mean she had explained the history of it to the author, but it had already been written and deployed. It is worded a little weird. It's also translated from german, I don't know if that is a factor or not.
Copypasted and than dropped into hosting folder, sweet web 1.0 style
Yeah although I didn't comment I found this weird as well. Chronology was vague and ill-defined. He went to a doctors office and the receptionist mentioned vibe coding their patient records system unprompted?
> A few days later, I started poking around the application.
What!? How... was there even a web-facing component to this system? Did the medical practice grant you access for some reason?
Yeah I'm back to calling bullshit. What a load of crap. Whole post probably written by an LLM.
I have decompiled database updaters to get the root password for the local SQL Server instance with extremely restricted access rules. (can't tell you which one...) I have also written many applications auto-clicking through medical apps, because there's no other way to achieve some batch changes in reasonable time. I have a lot of collateral knowledge in this area.
Now for the "unless it was some minimal support app" - you'll see lots of them and they existed before LLMs as well. They're definitely not protecting patient data as much as other systems. If the story is true in any way, it's probably this kind of helper that solves one specific usecase that other systems cannot. For example I'm working on an app which handles some large vaccination events and runs on a side of the main clinic management application. But accidentally putting that online, accessible to everyone, and having actual patient data imported would be hard-to-impossible to achieve for a non-dev.
For the recording and transcription, there are many companies doing that at the moment and it would be so much easier to go with any of them. They're really good quality these days.
Also, generally, very, very, VERY slow. The massive fines you hear about are usually for behaviour _years_ ago.
AFAIK, most ones seems to be acting at least once every now and then, judging by https://www.enforcementtracker.com/, is there any specific countries you're thinking about here?
Particularly, Romania, Italy and Spain seem to have had lots of cases.
None of that is related to the practice of Continuous Integration.
This is another difference to a largely organic developer: the ability to refuse a massively damaging or stupid task.
It's also absurd to think that there is no company which does genuine software "engineering". If you break ads at Google/Meta, streaming at Netflix, etc there are massive consequences. They are heavily incentivized to properly engineer their systems.
The main thing that governs whether time is spent to well-engineer something is if there is incentive to do it. In traditional engineering that incentive is the law (Getting council approval, not getting sued, etc). In software engineering that incentive is revenue.
Since the failings of not doing proper engineering is far more evident, the reasons for the "insanely overwrought processes and box-checking that exists for no reason and slows everything down to a snail's pace" go back to the earliest written law, AKA the Code of Hammurabi, circa 1754 BC! These rules are part of the core of our functional civilization.
Examples:
- Law 229 (Death of Owner): If a house collapses and kills the owner, the builder is put to death.
- Law 230 (Death of Owner’s Son): If the collapse kills the owner's son, the builder's son is put to death.
- Law 232 (Property Damage): The builder must replace any destroyed property and rebuild the collapsed house at their own expense.
- Law 233 (Structural Defects): If a wall "shifts" or is not built properly before completion, the builder must strengthen or repair it using their own silver/means.
> aware of existing and new laws, standards and codes of practice
Yeah, because software business is not at all ruled by fads.
1997: you have to follow Extreme Programming (XP) or you don't get your license
2000: you now have to use XML for everything in XML or you don't get your license
2002: you now have to follow Agile or you don't get your license
2025: you now have to write everything in Rust or you don't get your license
etc., etc.
Sysadmins/other adjacent roles should likely have the same requirements. An unmaintained/unsecured server can create a huge liability.
One of the key improvements for me when using Jira was that it has well defined patterns for all of these things, and Claude knows all about the various types of Jira tickets, and the patterns to use them.
Also, the spec driven approach is not enough in itself. The specs need sub-items, linked bug reports and fixes. I need comments on all of these tickets as we go with implementation decisions, commit SHAs, etc.
When I come back to some particular feature later, giving Claude the appropriate context in a way it knows how to use is super easy, and is a huge leap ahead in consistency.
I know I sound like some caveman talking about Jira here, but having Claude write and read from it really helped me out a lot.
It turns out that dumb ole Jira is an excellent "project memory" storage system for agentic coding tools.
I wouldn’t use it for work but it’s good enough to track my projects, note what’s in each release, has simple user and service account key issuance for api access, user roles and access control, project level configuration for kanban lanes and status mapping, claude can access everything via the api, simple project level document library with live preview markdown editing, etc.
Have you been using Claude Code/whichever tool you use, to read and write from OpenProject directly? I do like self-hosting data like this. I used to self-host Jira back in the day.
There are plenty of small medical practices with 1-2 doctors and a front desk.
On my last visit i actually casually discussed their IT system with a doctor.
Oh right, cool. Did it have a public-facing web-portal that you were able to "investigate" and that "Thirty minutes in, I had full read and write access to all patient data".
The level of credulity in these comments is immense.
It's a rarely updated personal blog, not a daily tabloid story.
> Technical Background
> The entire application was a single HTML file with all JavaScript, CSS, and structure written inline. The backend was a managed database service with zero access control configured, no row-level security, nothing. All "access control" logic lived in the JavaScript on the client side, meaning the data was literally one curl command away from anyone who looked.
> All audio recordings were sent directly to external AI APIs for transcription and summarization.
> There was more, but this is already enough to get the idea.
Hmmmm... interesting, now that I have the "Technical Background" I for sure know that this medical app was 100% vibe coded by a Medical Practice in the Real World and exists! (TM)
Professional bodies = gatekeeping. The existence of the body means that the thing its surrounding will be barred from others to enter.
It means financial barriers & "X years of experience required" that actual programmers rightfully decry.
Caveat: When it comes to anything that will affect physical reality, & therefore the physical safety of others, the standards & accreditations then become necessary.
NOTE ON CAVEAT: Whilst *most* software will fall under this caveat, NOT ALL WILL. (See single-player offline video games)
To create a blanket judgement for this domain is to invite the death of the hobbyist. And you, EdNutting, may get your wish, since Google's locking down Android sideloading because they're using your desires for such safety as a scapegoat for further control.
> We DO NOT have this in software engineering.
THIS IS A GOOD THING. FULLSTOP.
The ability to build your own tools & apps is one of the rightfully-lauded reasons why people should be able to learn about building software, WITHOUT being mandated to go to a physical building to learn.
To wall off the ability for people to learn how computers work is a major part of modern computer illiteracy that people cry & complain about, yet seem to love doing the exact actions that lead to the death of computer competency.
You are then bringing a whole host of other issues that are related in nature but not in practice: * Locking down of Android ecosystem * Openness of education * Remote teaching * Remote or online examination etc.
Professional bodies don't wall off the ability to learn nor to tinker at home, nor even to prototype or experiment (depending on scale and industry).
You can't confuse all these issues into one thing and say "we don't want this". It's a disingenuous way to argue the matter.
imo this is sold as "keeping people safe" but in practice it's really a gatekeeping grift that increases friction and prevents growth
Why don't you want the software engineer building your pacemaker or your medical CRM (or any other job where your immediate security is engaged) to have the same kind of verification and consequences for their actions?
It's fine to set up voluntary standards and choose surgeons you think live up to those
So we want to enable more people to be able to create for example pacemakers because of things like Linus's law, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". If we exclude "non-professionals" from the process of creating "professional" products, we tend to have less participation in the process of innovation and therefore get less innovation
2. pacemakers and other medical devices have to get approval from the government. So that's covered.
medical CRM software is covered by medical privacy laws which does what you say you want (criminalizes "bad" software) but in reality is a giant set of rules, many idiotic, that make health care more expensive for no benefit at all.
That said, the reality is that this safety comes at a cost, both monetary and in terms of “gatekeeping.” And many people would be fine (on paper) increasing risk 0.05% in exchange for 20% cut in costs or allowing disruption of established entities. But those 0.05% degradations add up quickly and unexpectedly.
Why shouldn't any self taught "software engineer" be liable for damages they caused due to negligence? If we had to sign off builds of critical components (like a pacemaker to stay with the analogy), there would be way more pushback against malpractice in the development process. Of course not all software projects require that level of rigor, but for medical stuff and I'm sure a lot of other fields, it should be mandatory to have at least one qualified engineer that is ultimately responsible.
I mean the story might be fake obviously, but is definitely plausible.
Things that absolutely 100% happen everytime I - a tech guy - experiences when I go to the doctor/phyiso-therapist etc... etc... These are discussions that are happening.
"Your claimed experience is different than my experience so you are lying"?
Don't try to bring social justice warrior talk onto a tech forum please.
you also claim that I am lying.
Are you willing to put money to be proven wrong? that it's normal to have a tech discussion with your doctor in Switzerland?
Spoiler: you didn't mate and you are full of shit.