Baldur Bjarnason
Equally, most those most vocal about the benefits of LLM-coding were bullish about dev before the bubble. They didn't see the flaws of the earlier state of affairs so they don't see what's wrong with magnifying that dysfunction 10x
Hence the divide in the discourse
Both see LLMs as a mechanism for scaling up existing software practices with minimal human observation
One group thinks this'll make the world 10x richer. The other thinks it'll be a catastrophe
Baldur Bjarnason
There is nothing either group can say to the other to shift them because the disagreement is down to a fundamental difference in world view
But if you aren't in tech and are wondering which to trust, just ask yourself: do you really think the chucklefucks of tech, the clowns who have been running the show over the past couple of decades, have got coding completely figured out?
/end
Baldur Bjarnason
And they are right. LLMs make it easier for devs to do work that doesn't matter in an industry that doesn't care, where the only thing that's measured is some bullshit measure that's disconnected from actual outcomes
Many of those most vocal about the dysfunctions of LLM-coding were ALREADY WARNING ABOUT THE DYSFUNCTIONS OF THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY BEFORE "AI". The dysfunctions predate this particular bubble and many in software have been concerned about them for years.
Baldur Bjarnason
Our current software crisis—we've had a few—has been ramping up IMO since the post-2007 bailouts. Instead of regulating finance, the US let the finance industry take over, which hasn't been great overall, but for software it's meant that "quality" stopped mattering
Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.
Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.
Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices
Baldur Bjarnason
There is little to no downside to poor software quality and the upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies
Some corners of the software industry are less affected. Others, such as web dev, are more affected
For example, the stock price for Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is up 12% today over its peak before it
Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences
Baldur Bjarnason
This has led to a field whose standard practices are a cluster of bad habits and superstition. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern devs. Misconceptions about test-driven dev abound.
When devs says that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that THIS is what they're automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn't matter
Baldur Bjarnason
LLMs exaggerate and exacerbate existing market and industry dysfunctions. They've hastened media's descent into fabrications and clickbait, accelerated the devaluation of writing and illustration. And in software it has fuelled an existing crisis and exposed a divide at the core of the industry
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