It's great to add new features, but couldn't GitHub fix the essential ones first?
Just this week, I encountered the following problems:
- a diff showing "0 files changed" while there are many [1];
- suggested changes in a PR not rendering the original line [2];
- bug trackers not showing more than the 40th page [3].
Might seem nitpicky but it was just over the last week... I have a whole bunch of other bugs on my mind, and unfortunately, it's only gotten worse over the years. To the point where I almost don't care anymore.
In the current age of AI, the cost of adding new features is much, much lower than the cost of fixing bugs.
This has always been the case to a certain extent, but the effect has now been amplified to the point that certain complex bugs will likely remain unfixed forever if AI can't fix them easily.
Speaking of github in the age of AI, I heard a rumor from another partner of their parent company that fixing those things should be easy with AI, that the AI that they have now is so terrifyingly good that people shouldn't be allowed to use some of it without a license, and that the stuff they're holding back is far better than even that.
Seeing as they have infinity tokens to spend on godlike secret AI, isn't it weird that those same bugs are still sitting on the bugtracker? Shouldn't Microsoft just pull up the secret OpenAI panel and prompt "fix all github bugs, triage out primitive public-level AI slop first"?
I think it shows "100% test coverage" isn't testing what matters otherwise AI would get signals back telling it things are bad so keep working until they are good. I don't have a solution for this but more and more tests isn't the answer. I had AI create a small-ish CLI the other day and it added >2k tests and things still felt garbage. Now imagine that at GH.com scale. AI won't solve it with the current paradigms. I would love if someone could point me at good research in this area (not prompt evals).
the cognitive dissonance between “software engineering is a solved problem” and the state of software everywhere (still pretty crappy, maybe even worse than a couple of years ago) is staggering
A lot of those bugs are fundamental ones related to the basic architecture unfortunately and can’t be easily fixed because of all the load bearing crap that has been added on top of code written nearly twenty years ago. or so a little birdy told me…
Just this week, I encountered the following problems:
- a diff showing "0 files changed" while there are many [1];
- suggested changes in a PR not rendering the original line [2];
- bug trackers not showing more than the 40th page [3].
Might seem nitpicky but it was just over the last week... I have a whole bunch of other bugs on my mind, and unfortunately, it's only gotten worse over the years. To the point where I almost don't care anymore.
[1] https://github.com/PokeAPI/sprites/pull/284#issuecomment-585...
[2] https://github.com/Delgan/loguru/pull/1516#discussion_r41268...
[3] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182925