alt Hacker NewsSome engineers will point to this and say, hey, AI is not gonna work. It doesn’t reason very well and it leads to these problems.
But what they’re missing is all code quality is going to tank, and we are just going to accept that. Just as artisanal goods were replaced in the Industrial Revolution with mass produced inferior ones.
People will accept bad code if it is cheap enough.
We’ve gotten used to aiming for great, even if we often only hit functional. The new bar is going to be so much lower. Welcome to the era of cheap bad code. Lots more software, lots more value overall, but much worse reliability. Every day the apps I use get buggier.
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You are comparing code to a tshirt but it is more similar to infrastructure like roads/bridges/buildings. It is like a platform that you build other stuff on top of
The economics of software are very different from physical goods. Margins on software (products) are orders of magnitude higher. Any cost shaving done at coding time is economically irrelevant in the long run, detrimental to quality/reputation and could almost be seen as a risk. Furthermore, assuming the bottleneck in this process has so far been coding is pure BS.
You are almost right. As I say since the beginning of this ai circus, this is the equivalent of flipping mcdonalds burgers (no insult intended for those workers). It is a thing, and people buy and eat them. But high quality burgers made by talented chefs will always be out there. That's my analogy, and i dont intend to be on the side of flipping mcdonalds burgers
I thought this too, but it's still weird.
Machines that make e.g. paper are great. They are immensely more efficient, but extremely consistent and superhuman (try making that perfectly smooth letter paper by hand).
Human written software is the same. Where you had N people copying data from spreadsheets for M suppliers into an internal database or whatever, you now have one program doing it. It can be scaled infinitely for a fraction of the cost. It _never_ messes up. The cost of the software developer is trivial in comparison. Software was a space where the marginal cost for quality was extremely cheap.
I don't get how AI fits in here. Software already had massive scale. You aren't replacing a massive data entry team with AI, you're replacing a reliable piece of software written by a human with a reliable (?) piece of software written by AI controlled by a human. There's no increase in scale. Until the reliability issues are fixed a very noticeable decrease in reliability (sure, some software was bad already, but now the good developers are also writing bad code).
This doesn't seem like a natural step to me at all. The best explanation I can come up with is AI is just being used as an excuse for destructive penny pinching.