alt Hacker News> Ignoring outright bad code, in a world where functional code is so abundant that “good” and “bad” are indistinguishable, ultimately, what makes functional AI code slop or non-slop?
I'm sorry, but this is an indicator for me that the author hasn't had a critical eye for quality in some time. There is massive overlap between "bad" and "functional." More than ever. The barrier-to-entry to programming got irresponsibly low for a time there, and it's going to get worse. The toolchains are not in a good way. Windows and macOS are degrading both in performance and usability, LLVM still takes 90% of a compiler's CPU time in unoptimized builds, Notepad has AI (and crashes,) simple social (mobile) apps are >300 MB download/installs when eight years ago they were hovering around a tenth of that, a site like Reddit only works on hardware which is only "cheap" in the top 3 GDP nations in the world... The list goes on. Whatever we're doing, it is not scaling.
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One issue is that tooling and internals have been optimized for individual people's tastes currently. Heterogeneous environments make the models spikier. As we shift to building more homogenized systems optimized around agent accessibility, I think we'll see significant improvements
Elegantly, agents finally give us an objective measure of what "good" code is. It's code that maximizes the likelihood that future agents will be able to successfully solve problems in this codebase. If code is "bad" it makes future problems harder.
This is the "artisanal clothing argument".
I'd think there'll be a dip in code quality (compared to human) initially due to "AI machinery" due to its immaturity. But over-time on a mass-scale - we are going to see an improvement in the quality of software artifacts.
It is easier to 'discipline' the top 5 AI agents in the planet - rather than try to get a million distributed devs ("artisans") to produce high quality results.
It's like in the clothing or manufacturing industry I think. Artisans were able to produce better individual results than the average industry machinery, at least initially. But overtime - industry machinery could match the average artisan or even beat the average, while decisively beating in scale, speed, energy efficiency and so on.