The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.

edit: sentence fixed.

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afro88 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in the face of a lot of previously unaffordable goods now broadly available and affordable.

You can still buy high goods made with care when it matters to you, but that's the exception. It will be the same with software. A lot of what we use will be mass produced with AI, and even produced in realtime on the fly (in 5 years maybe?). There will be some things where we'll pay a premium for software crafted with care, but for most it won't matter because of the benefits of rapidly produced software.

We've got a glimpse of this with things like Claude Artifacts. I now have a piece of software quite unique to my needs that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't care that it's one big js file. It works and it's what I need and I got it pretty much for free. The capability of things like Artifacts will continue to grow and we'll care less and less that it wasn't human produced with care.

	▲	kiba 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Poor quality is not synonymous with mass production. It's just cheap crap made with little care.

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lxgr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> The era of software mass production has begun.

We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine.

> I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down.

At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.

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pacifika 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah it’s interesting to see if blaming LLMs becomes as acceptable as “caused by a technical fault” to deflect responsibility from what is a programmer’s output.

Perhaps that’s what lead to a decline in accountability and quality.

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knollimar 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a buge difference between possible and likely.

Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet

	▲	lxgr 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it. The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.

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goldeneas 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs

That's obvious. It's a matter of which makes it more likely

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41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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