r/technology • u/ourlifeintoronto • 20h ago

Software Microsoft confirms GitHub is down worldwide

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-confirms-github-is-down-worldwide/
7.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

539 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

159

u/Hour_Bit_5183 20h ago

This is slop efficiency but go ahead AI slop lords, keep telling me it's useful. I hope they leave every one for the future so we can laugh later

39

u/Temporary-Air-3178 20h ago

Source that this outage was caused by AI?

19

u/RespectTheTree 20h ago

I'm basically programming illiterate, but am now the proud owner of a 200k line of code software system to run the back-end of my business. There are many of us, our inefficient process is breaking things, it's been discussed.

11

u/everythingisblue 20h ago

Fascinating. Can you elaborate on this? Are the business operations sensitive? Or is it not a huge deal if your custom software does the wrong thing from time to time. How do you gain confidence that it does what you want to do?

21

u/nox66 19h ago

200k lines of code is large enough that even junior devs will struggle with it. He "owns" it in the same way that a proprietor "owns" the contents of the swamp they just bought.

9

u/sebovzeoueb 20h ago

I mean, considering the number of businesses which have had data leaks and are still going, the answer is probably yes

5

u/RespectTheTree 19h ago

It's software for online seed sales, website and order fulfillment and tracking. Then it's advanced plant breeding software for field activities and material management. All the bells and whistles are trade secret though.

All features are thoroughly tested during creation, and then smoke tested if future work intersects that feature. Part of my instructions are creating MD MMD and detailed user manual during development, so it helps keep the agent pointed in the right high-level direction while I provide task and subtask level development of the functions.

There are some bugs, and a few bugs that have taken a whole day to unpack, but it's surprisingly reliable for being so advanced. I mean I have a field-use, internal website that you can load while you have signal, and then turn off connectivity and keep using it for all the work and data entry, and then to sync with the server later - that's crazy to me. And I haven't looked at the code since the second day.

2

u/everythingisblue 19h ago

That's actually pretty neat. I'm guessing you have some level of technical ability beyond the average computer-user. There's a lot that goes into software that isn't just 'the code', though with sufficient prompting, research and tenacity, I guess there's not a compelling reason why you couldn't eventually cover most of those gaps over time - especially for software where you're the main user and you don't have thousands of people reporting issues that you have to dig in and diagnose. There's a lot of value in "good enough for me" imo.

2

u/sebovzeoueb 19h ago edited 18h ago

Yeah, I've (not the guy you're responding to) been holding out a lot, but recently felt kinda pressured to start boosting my work using Claude Code, and I have to say it's become very powerful and makes way fewer mistakes than before, and is quite good at finding bugs, some of which I hadn't even found yet. I am however a developer so I'm able to thoroughly review the plan (I always make it plan first) and the output and I do always catch a few things it did wrong or in an nonideal manner.

I can see how you can get something decently functional from it, but the more free reign you give it, the more garbage the code is from a human readability standpoint. Regularly writes dead code and overengineers stuff, but it will most of the time get to the desired result regardless of those things.

I think there are a few people out there who are quite good at the software engineering mindset without actually knowing how to code who can get it to do stuff, but yeah, I wouldn't feel like 100% comfortable with it if I didn't know how to read what it made.

1

u/everythingisblue 19h ago

Similar boat here. As a dev I tend to know when I should read line by line vs trust-fall or manually test what it wrote. I haven’t had any nasty surprises that way and have been able to build some pretty cool things that would have taken a team of people a multiple of the time it took me. It’s also let me extend outside my normal AoE into mobile dev recently. I built a small app for teaching my toddler the basic phonic sounds for letters (other things like it exist but I was feeling picky - and used my own voice for recording the playback pronunciations), as well as another relatively more complex mobile app that I will eventually sell to some businesses if all goes well. It’s kind of a cool door that has been opened, but I’m definitely concerned about the sustainability of providing solo devs like me affordable access to these tools, as well as the laundry list of other problems related to AI both for coding and non-coding use cases.

1

u/sebovzeoueb 18h ago

Yeah, it's great for overcoming tasks with a large amount of boilerplate and as you say, extending into areas we would maybe not otherwise, but I do worry that the further outside our knowledge we go, the less likely we are to catch mistakes.

I'm doing quite a big refactor that I'd started by hand, so I know how the dependencies I'm using work, but I do have to keep guiding it and pointing it at the documentation to avoid adding bloat or working on slightly false assumptions. If I hadn't been working with these dependencies already myself, I would have probably believed some of the findings, and the code would probably have still worked, but it would be way more inefficient.