> Those people are going to be the absolute most dangerous possible thing you can do to a company.

I hear you, but here's the thing: the companies don't give a shit about software quality any farther than it takes to keep you coming back as a customer. And it's actually been like this for a long time. They're going to hire people who can ship who-cares-how-buggy software as fast as possible. It's better for the bottom line.

And that pains my soul and pains me as a consumer (because we already had to put up with too much crap software before genAI started producing it in reams), but there's very limited money in the kind of quality you're talking about.

I hear stories from people interviewing now--the interviewers react negatively if you tell them you're working on keeping your programming skills fresh. They just want to know how many agents you can run at a time and how many lines of code you can generate per day.

Personally, I think someone skilled in software development working with genAI is going to be more productive than someone not skilled working with genAI, but I don't think that's even being selected for now.

Grim days.

The one thing that gives me hope is that every time we ask our graduates who are now in the field (and all work with AI) if we should drop classic CS education and only do AI, they all emphatically reply in the negative. Yes, we need some AI education in there, but they want the foundation, too.

It is rather backwards. I've not seen things quite as bad as interviewers wanting to know how many agents you can run, but the attitude of "launch & fix later" is always present and kind of depressing.

Then I think of the companies (not necessarily software) that have had long term success and their products have been quite high quality at least at some point in time. The count of genAI instances someone can keep in flight is certainly a weird metric that I think will hurt the companies who choose to ignore quality.

Unfortunately it's a long process as it's possible to get very far with great marketing and sales with a poor quality product too. Then cash out before customers figure out that there's something else that is better. I have no idea if this pattern will ever self-correct.

Off topic: I followed your guides for network programming years ago getting my tiny C server/client setup working. Thank you so much for writing them!