alt Hacker NewsThe best argument I've yet heard against the effectiveness of AI tools for SW dev is the absence of an explosion of shovelware over the past 1-2 years.
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.
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Interesting approach. I can think of one more explanation the author didn't consider: what if software development time wasn't the bottleneck to what he analyzed? The chart for Google Play app submissions, for example, goes down because Google made it much more difficult to publish apps on their store in ways unrelated to software quality. In that case, it wouldn't matter whether AI tools could write a billion production-ready apps, because the limiting factor is Google's submission requirements.
Interesting, I would make the exact opposite conclusion from the same data: if AI coding was that bad, we'd see more crapware.
Are you sure we aren't seeing an increase in steam games?
Charts I'm looking at show a mild exponential around 2024 https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-rele...
Also theres probably a bottleneck in manual review time.