| ▲ | jazz9k 5 days ago |
| The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers. |
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| ▲ | AngryData 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Would you say mechanics, repairmen, and other trade workers are more valuable today? They have become rarer yes, and everyone thinks they must be making bank off their rarer skill set, and yet the actual wages those skilled people receive haven't gone up. Sure sure you can point to some random plumber living in the heart of NYC that is sitting on a multimillion dollar piece of land to hold their supplies and vans as making a lot of money, but that doesn't make up for the other 99% of the plumbers of the nation who don't make such wages despite having just as valuable of a skill. How many people here can frame a house? Meanwhile I stopped framing because I made more money driving a forklift around a warehouse. My father stopped wrenching because he made more money selling heavy equipment parts than he did fixing million dollar pieces of heavy equipment in shitty and hazardous environments. When tools make skill less relevant, the skilled workers get the boot. Even if the skilled versus non-skilled ends up a wash in dollar per productivity so you think the lower quality would make the skilled workers preferable, the unskilled workers will still win out because they are far easier to replace. You fire the best cabinet maker around in 200 miles, you are in trouble. If you fire 10 doofuses a year for shitty work, you can just get 10 more within just a few days. Quality may suffer but volume makes up for it and will push out competition because quality is not easily measured or seen by customers who can't recognize it. |
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| ▲ | lmorchard 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Meanwhile, Undertale, one of the most celebrated video games, famously has a 1000+ line switch statement and AI had nothing to do with it. Sometimes you have to bang out something that works, just to even get the chance to be annoyed at how bad it is for next version. |
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| ▲ | tytho 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Game development is often a completely different set of skills and maintenance profile compared to enterprise SaaS development. Many single-player games especially indie ones don’t need to worry about multi-year contracts or having to work through many cycles of different developers coming in and out of a project. Having a 1000+ line switch statement seems totally reasonable on a project with a handful of developers that will continue to work on the project. My understanding is that the switch statement was for npc character conversation text. That seems pretty reasonable, even in enterprise SaaS for something like translations. It might not be as easy to maintain in other circumstances. | | |
| ▲ | airbreather 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I would suggest that the 1000 line switch statement implies a state machine that has suffered from the "state explosion". This usually results from an inadequate system-subsystem decomposition and/or not considering modes, both of which lead to hierarchal state machines instead of one big flat one. This aspect of architecture is difficult to teach, it is one of the "black arts" that comes from experience and is difficult to codify. Just one example why, is that often it might require the synthesis of state machines not directly evident as needed from the functionality, eg to perform a one to many or many to one functionality. | | |
| ▲ | 8note 4 days ago | parent [-] | | https://i.redd.it/vglorgtzx0kd1.png can't find the actual code, but its a look up table for what dialogue to use. The existence of a switch statement does not force the code to be a state machine. it could still be some architectural deficit around making it harder to look up the dialogue rather than having it in place when uts triggered, but it makes it nice to understand all the dialogue in the game at once | | |
| ▲ | airbreather 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Even if not explicitly looking like a state machine, it will have state based behaviour that could be represented by a state machine. Almost everything is state based behaviour. |
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| ▲ | whateveracct 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Toby Fox also took a LONG time to realize its sequel, DeltaRune. He attributed it to not being able to program the more complex systems he wanted to build. So code earlier compounds later - good or bad. As is tradition. |
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| ▲ | PaulKeeble 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing. |
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| ▲ | Ekaros 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What I fear is that early or even current steps of this process is replacing parts of the code or all code wholesale. With as broken or just slightly less broken code. Albeit the way it is broken could be different each time. So problems are not fixed, they are just replaced with different problems. Ad nauseum... | |
| ▲ | gibbitz 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is the pattern. The labor is nearly worthless, so just have the bot reinvent the wheel every time. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And like SEO blog spam it’s just going to grow in volume because people want to pad their CV’s with all sorts of activity in GitHub regardless of the quality | |
| ▲ | sph 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Single-use applications" but instead of a bash script, it's a 250k lines monstrosity in Rust because "static typing" |
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| ▲ | ryandvm 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Perhaps, but damn, fixing shitty code is not the "craft" that I signed up for twenty years ago. |
