The Gods That Ate the Engineers
The article discusses the disconnect in software engineering between compliance with established standards and the actual needs of a project. It highlights the lack of measurable outcomes in software quality, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of engineering decisions. The author argues that this gap has led to reliance on authority and conventions, resulting in practices that may not address the underlying issues in software development.
- ▪Software engineering lacks the ability to measure quality in the same way other engineering disciplines can.
- ▪The only validation for software is whether it works, which leads to all approaches being seen as equally valid.
- ▪This absence of measurement has resulted in reliance on authority and established practices, referred to as 'demigods'.
DEV.to (Top) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 4,924 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/leonpennings/the-gods-that-ate-the-engineers-210h |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 05:55:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T06:07:56.865Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T06:07:56.865Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cevJw_gntxeO |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3596884) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Leon Pennings Posted on May 27 The Gods That Ate the Engineers #java #architecture #softwaredevelopment #programming How software development mistook its tools for its craft — and what it is paying for that mistake There is a conversation that happens in software teams every day. Someone proposes a simpler approach. Someone else says "but we need this to scale." The first person asks what scale is actually required.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from DEV.to (Top)
