AI Still Cannot Fix Its Own Bugs
Also Airlines Charge a Premium for Being Alone

The Intern Was Technically Correct, Which Is The Worst Kind of Correct

The existential panic of the coding world briefly paused this week to acknowledge a simple truth: large language models still cannot fix your most complicated, context-sensitive production bugs. Salvatore "antirez" Sanfilippo, a venerable Redis developer, wrote a post detailing a high-stakes, subtle issue in the Vector Sets feature involving the serialization of Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs. The problem was deep, concerning data corruption resistance that was added while he was away, and it required a truly creative, low-level fix.

The article argues that when presented with the problem, the LLM could propose several technically plausible but ultimately disastrous solutions. It failed to grasp the architectural trade-offs that an experienced human developer would instantly understand, specifically the performance cost of re-inserting data versus a cleverer approach. Antirez eventually solved the problem with an innovative XOR and hash function combination, a solution that required lateral thinking rather than pattern matching. The consensus remains that the AI is a great tool for generating boilerplate code, but is essentially a high-speed intern that can generate one hundred lines of code per second, all of which must be thoroughly code-reviewed by a cynical human to prevent a full-stack, career-limiting oopsie. Human coders remain better than LLMs, for now, which is a stressful relief.

Your Emotional State Is Now a Price Multiplier

Major US carriers like American, Delta, and United Air Lines have been caught running an experimental new feature on their pricing engines; charging people traveling alone significantly more than those traveling in groups. Analysts at Thrifty Traveler found massive discrepancies, with solo travelers paying up to double the per-person fare on certain one-way domestic flights.

The core logic of the algorithmic behavior is simple and profoundly stupid. The system deduces that a lone person buying a one-way domestic ticket is likely an emergency business traveler who will pay anything, while a group is likely a leisure party looking for a deal. The code has simply decided that being socially isolated or having a short-notice obligation is a high-value consumer segment. It’s comforting to know that our most advanced pricing technology has evolved to treat human loneliness and necessity as an API endpoint for an arbitrary surcharge, confirming that all sophisticated business models are ultimately just a polite shakedown.

The Weather Channel Simulator Is The Most Stable Code of the Week

Amidst the constant churn of generative AI and blockchain, a tiny, perfect corner of the internet is celebrating the quiet, reliable efficiency of the past. A developer built a web-based simulator for the WeatherStar 4000+, the iconic computer system that generated the local forecasts on The Weather Channel throughout the 1990s. This is the zenith of non-disruptive technology; simple blue-and-orange graphics, soothing Muzak, and absolutely zero pretense of disrupting any industry.

The project is a testament to the idea that the most profound technological achievement of the modern era is using JavaScript to recreate an artifact from the 90s, where the tech was so reliable you barely noticed it existed. In a deeply ironic twist, the developer was unable to include the original, famous elevator-music soundtrack because of the baffling complexity of modern digital copyright law, thus demonstrating that in the 21st century, the only thing more cumbersome than fixing a Redis Vector Set bug is legally piping smooth jazz from 1993 into a browser window.

Briefs

• Dotnet Run Update: Microsoft now allows users to run a C# file directly using the dotnet run app.cs command. This is yet another minor quality-of-life feature that should have been available at the turn of the century, but we should all be grateful that the decade-long process of making the command line marginally less hostile has finally yielded a result.
• Vintage Web Gurus: The forgotten sages of 90s web design, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Jakob Nielsen, are being discussed, reminding everyone that before the current mess, there was an era where people believed a simple design and predictable navigation were desirable features, not technical debt.
• New Social Club: A new platform, Wave3, is attempting to solve the male loneliness epidemic by starting a social club. The market for social connection, like every other human need, has now been correctly identified as a venture-backable opportunity.