We are living in a ZIRP-like era where builders at the fastest pace layer have misattributed their velocity to exponential gains in model capability. In fact, they are surfing on decades of careful effort to build a robust foundation of highly reusable software libraries.

This strategy will seem to work really well until the economy that enabled that foundation to form is hollowed out. Then, there will be a reckoning (but we will have no choice but to march forth from there).

"exponential growth of crappy X" applies to every industry that went from being an artisanal craft to being mass produced with little or no human input. and we live much better lives than we did before the industrial revolution.

You could say the same when higher level languages getting popular. Previously programming was the domain of Math, Physics, EE doctorates. These days we even have a few months coding bootcamp

I still can't tell from the outside whether it sounds like a great time to be in security because of the vulnerable slop being churned out, or a terrible time because the people paying to make it don't care.

Crap is fine if it gets the job done. I think software as an industry will change to more ephemeral construction.

I am more and more inclined into not believing this crappy software theory.

Especially as teams invest in proper agentic harnessing.

We have had a champion in our team that has invested a lot of time into it over the last 4 months, and if anything, quality has improved, not decreased. Architecture is more coherent, codebase has been cleaned up, agents find information quickly, code produced is very solid and my role is more and more checking that the output meets the requirements. But I cannot confidently say that I would've done a better job than AI more often than not I have to admit it does a better job than mine.

The mistakes are less and less technical and merely in the domain mapping. And AI is still not creative as I am for finding solutions quickly to unlock stakeholders' issues. Also, AI is still not creative as I am for finding the proper solutions for advanced technical problems. But it does a better job than me, even on that front, one shotting few solutions in a fraction of a time it would've taken me to test one idea myself.

Mind you, I don't like AI and I think it ruined the job, I don't like working this way, it's exhausting, way more work on one side, way less fun and fiddling with technical parts.

And yet, I have the genuine belief that few years from now we'll be cloning open source repositories that are already optimized/harnessed and tested for agentic loops and best practices left and right with software engineers mostly overseeing the domain translation and putting their 2 cents on the non-boilerplatey parts of the product (which, in general, are a small part of the surface).

I think that the next years of my career will be mostly spent in setting up and writing the harnessing and domain mapping part. Then I will move to another sector, not because I necessarily believe I won't have a job, but because I want to vomit thinking that's going to be my job.