The code is what the code does.

The shoe is what the shoe does.

Except one shoe is made by children in a fire-trap sweatshop with no breaks, and the other was made by a well paid adult in good working conditions.

The ends don’t justify the means. The process of making impacts the output in ways that are subtle and important, but even holding the output as a fixed thing - the process of making still matters, at least to the people making it.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yet the people voting with their wallets seem to go with cheaper option, regardless of what hides behind it.

Being shoes, offshoring, Webwidgets or AI generated code.

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raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The end is whether the code meets the functional and non functional requirements.

And guess how much shoe companies make who manufacture shoes in sweatshop conditions versus the ones who make artisanal handcrafted shoes?

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kennywinker 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ah yes - we should all strive to maximize shareholder value - triangle shirtwaist be damnned.

Btw in my metaphor, we - the programmers - are the kids in the sweatshop.

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raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you are a “programmer” you are going to be the kids in the sweatshop. On the enterprise dev side where most developers work, it’s been headed in that direction for at least a decade where it was easy enough to become a “good enough” generic full stack/mobile/web etc dev.

Even on the BigTech side being able to reverse a btree on the whiteboard and having on your resume that you were a mid level developer isn’t enough either anymore

If you look at the comp on that side, it’s also stagnated for decade. AI has just accelerated that trend.

While my job has been at various percentages to produce code for 30 years, it’s been well over a decade since I had to sell myself on “I codez real gud”. I sell myself as a “software engineer” who can go from ambiguous business and technical requirements, deal with politics, XYProblems, etc

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What do you think programmers in offshoring consulting shops are? Sadly.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. I work in a consulting company as a customer facing staff consultant - highest level - specializing in cloud + app dev. We don’t hire anyone less than staff in the US. Anything lower is hired out of the country. That’s exactly my point. “Programming” was clearly becoming commoditized a decade ago.

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uoaei an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Functional requirements are known knowns.

Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns.

Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a more attentive audit by human eyeballs.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Are you as a developer 100% able to trust that you didn’t miss anything? Your team if you are a team lead who delegates tasks to other developers? If you outsource non business things like Salesforce integrations etc do you know all of the code they wrote? Your library dependencies? Your infrastructure providers?