// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Explaining to business people why building software is still hard
It’s 1 pm on the final day of the Hackathon, 5 hours left. For the last 2 hours, we made ZERO progress. I’m cursing the day Lovable was born. As soon as I fix one problem, another one appears, and our app is barely usable.
The start was very promising. I joined 2 engineering friends and 3 recruiters to build ‘HoneyCrew’, a smart referral system (the goal was to send a weekly summary to every employee with potential candidates from their network for our open roles. Here’s an open source version). We decided to go with Lovable so the recruiting team can maintain it themselves later.
On the first day, we just FLEW, completing 90% of the project. Scraping, scoring, Slack integration, admin - things looked almost ready.
On the 2nd (and final) day, we worked on some minor improvements, and things just… Completely broke. Endless bugs everywhere, slowness, everyone super stressed.
The recruiters on our team couldn’t understand what went wrong. We were on the path for an amazing product, and now we were in danger of not having anything ready for the demo.
I used to work with a senior leader who loved to say that he has an allergy to the words ‘refactor’ and ‘infra work’. He couldn’t understand why we couldn't build it right from the beginning, and why we were always so slow. After LLMs appeared, it became even worse. He constantly asked: “Can’t you just give this task to ChatGPT? What’s the problem?”
To his credit, he at least asked this to our faces. I know many non-technical leaders who think engineers always exaggerate and work too slowly. It’s a flavor of the same old software engineering war I talked about last week.
A coworker (and a good friend) once framed it like this: “You write code, which is just words in a language I don’t understand, right? With fixed meaning. And you know what you want to say, as you have the specs you need to follow. How come it always gets more complicated?”
I’ve been struggling to explain this, until I almost bought a house:
Last October, we saw a house for sale near my parents-in-law. It looked like a great deal - good location, nice neighbors, a garden like we wanted, and very affordable. It was small and 30 years old, but the low price left us extra to spend on it.