Some 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.
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.
> 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.
I think a big part of the explanation is business leaders aren't actually as smart or thoughtful as they're made out to be. They may have an inaccurate and unrealistic view of LLMs, and making policy and decisions based on that view.
Also business leaders and management are often extremely tolerate and even seem to encourage bad code. The code is a black box that they usually don't even have to use, bugginess and unreliability are often hard to quantify and can be swept under the run. "Saving" $5,000 by not fixing a bug could over time lead to say $10,000 in unquantified costs, but it looks like the "smart" decision on a budget spreadsheet. They only really pay attention once quality is disaster level, or there's some unusually high-profile problem.
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.
Margins on software will no longer be what they were, that’s the point. Commoditisation means software values will head to zero. Margins will depend on factors unconnected to the software itself. For example, brand, distribution, network effects, lock on, proprietary data.
It doesn’t matter whether coding was “the bottleneck”. It’s irrelevant. Fact is it used to be expensive to create software and now you’ll be to create it for super cheap. Yes, it won’t be as good. But the price will be so low it won’t matter. This is what commoditisation means. Forget the economics of software as you know it, that has ended.
> assuming the bottleneck in this process has so far been coding is pure BS.
This is the core insight for most businesses.
When evaluating the impact of AI on velocity, the first thing to consider is how long it takes for a one-line code change to get into production, including initial analysis and specs.
The cope island of objections will continue to shrink.
Being able to easy create apps means huge supply, which means commodification of software just like the commodification of physical goods. Mass supply means low prices. It won’t be economic to have artisan coders any more than to have artisan goods makers.
The point is that artisanal code is to a first approximation a thing of the past. Most engineers will not have a job writing code in these niches that survive, and thus coding as a career is effectively dead.
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
Where I live, gourmet high quality burger joints definitely, and massively overwhelm McDonalds in number (Geneva, Switzerland). Even if I count in burger king. Shows that sometimes people pay for the quality even if they don't desperately need it. And its trivial to make better burgers than mcd, heck I can surpass them trivially at home with every ingredient, they are really the lowest level of quality, taste, looks, or (lack of) healthy components. You don't need Michelin * for that, far from it. Plus food is often cold outside of peak hours, something that never happened to me in proper restaurant.
Also, mcd ain't at the end much cheaper, just marginally, the choice of drinks is pathetic, usually no beer. The main reason folks go there because its easier/faster than getting table in real restaurant. But also the environment in mcd is absolute soulless cheap fugly shit. (there are kids corners to be fair, but they are often disgustingly dirty).
Its a very good analogy at the end IMHO, maybe just not tilting the way you intended, at least not here.
Haha well not my analogy, analogy is not a good way to reason, but Geneva in this situation is exactly the exception that proves the rule. Thanks for emphasising my point.
> i dont intend to be on the side of flipping mcdonalds burgers
So say the kitchen staff at every Denny's too. And yet...
The analogy is apt, but your coping strategy falls down because of numbers. There aren't a lot of spots for those "chefs" to get paid like they expect.
Most HN commenters might have gotten by over the past decades thinking they were "talented chefs", but were really more like the "short order cooks" whose jobs got eaten by fast food.
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.