Comment by 0c3ca83
2 days ago
Those manufacturing videos are of someone making the exact same thing over and over. Months and years of testing go into ensuring that there is no change in the system, and continuous monitoring is put in place so that if any changes slip in, it can be undone. The design is set in stone, as it should be, and variations are bugs. There are months to years of cheap prototypes, iteration, design changes, pipeline tuning, and verification to ensure that nothing will need to change for the next million items.
If you want a software analogy to those devices getting churned off the assembly lines, it's the TCP streams coming out of your network card, with crazy checksums punching out bad packets.
We're orders of magnitude better at reliability with code, but we're regressing on that metric rather quickly. And the comment above deeply misunderstands both manufacturing and software.
The repetitive piece - the piece that needs that process-control - is moving from shipping code to its creation.
That's new. All analogies to 2022 software engineering need to be thrown out.
Software construction is now more like an industrial process, with the artisanal work shifting towards both
1. aligning what's built with what's needed (talking to customers!)
as well as
2. implementing and tuning your software construction process (ie. hi - we're Anthropic. We're burying ourselves in a mountain of code but it's okay because the fix is a second mountain of code, try some tokens the first hit's free!)
Back to my original point...
Writing code is now on the production line; making quality output demands industrial grade/scale verification (some involving humans of course).. which is a fascinating engineering challenge, and it's brand new!
Sure, I'd you want the exact same code created every time, I can automate that with cp. It's perfectly reliable, and checksums can catch the few times it fails.
Verification means nothing for industrial processes when the desired outcome is a moving target, so the first part of an industrial process is to develop a fixed target and aggressively remove variation.
Moving the target around is a research problem, before you feed the result into an industrial process.
Software solved industrialization so well we even forgot that we go from research to industrial with `npm` deployments or whatever your package manager of choice is.
You should go learn about test driven development and test first development in general.
It absolutely can be industrialized: the agent writes tests that conform to your requirements; the harness makes sure those tests pass before work can stop.
Have a look at https://codeleash.dev/docs/tdd-guard for my (dated but still interesting) take on this. Claude Code hooks are really useful to do the enforcement.
It's open source so no need to read my crappy generated docs - you can point your agent at the repo and ask it questions.
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Stop trying to use analogies to reason. Analogies are for persuasion and colour, not for thinking.
The process of anthropic, turning gold into shit software, is hardly something to emulate. What is the evidence software should now be produced in an industrial way? Because arthropic (the ones selling you the shovels) says so?