Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    18 hours ago

    This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that it’ll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesn’t say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.

    https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

    A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:

    1. For every code change merged, the probability of a production incident has more than tripled.

    The incidents-to-PR ratio is up 242.7% as teams move from low to high AI adoption.

    1. Bugs are accelerating, not stabilizing.

    In our 2025 AI engineering report on the AI Productivity Paradox, bugs per developer were up 9% as AI adoption grew. In this dataset, that figure has risen to 54%

    1. The most experienced people in your organization are being buried.

    Median time to first PR review is up 156.6%. Average time spent in code review is up 199.6%. Median time in review is up 441.5%. The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Merideth’s The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering you’d be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what I’ve been following I don’t know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then it’s only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.

      Also the fact that the framing here doesn’t seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If you’re not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?