I kind of think this article misses the mark a little.

There is skill loss from heavy AI use.

But I want to acknowledge the awkward elephant in the room. AI Is making people too fast. I don't mean that a faster output is bad. It's a faster output and code rather than a full understanding and experience in producing the code. It's rewarding people who try to talk about business value rather than the people that are building and making safe decisions with deep knowledge.

AI: Yes, its good and it can produce some good solutions, however it ultimately doesn't know what it's doing and at the best of cases needs strong orchestrators.

We're in a cesspit of business driven development and they're not getting the right harsh and repulational punishments for bad decisions.

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zbentley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I think the brutal truth is that the priority of most businesses was always that approximate, slipshod, business-driven development. The human engineering process was only coincidentally a check back against the worst outcomes of that philosophy, not intentionally one.

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throwaway041207 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I certainly think that is true of the current moment, but where I think this is going is towards a model where the cost of human labor collapses, feature delivery slows (relative to the churn that is happening now), but becomes more predictable and less error prone (in terms of final delivery). I think that is the model that we see in manufacturing, and I think it's probably going to replicate in software engineering. New code (that a human didn't even look at, tbh) will be stress tested for correctness, progressively introduced and final delivery will be easy to forecast and most of the time will be delivered on time.

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wiieee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah but all these firms are going to get destroyed by firms led by people who are more disciplined and enforce rigour in thought etc that’ll be pushed through discouraging over-use of llm’s.

Apple didn’t go from near bankrupt to where it is today without that discipline.

	▲	throwaway041207 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> more disciplined and enforce rigour Eventually this will be automated as well. Discipline, rigor and correctness are not strictly human tasks.
	▲	WorldMaker an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We can hope. The markets are rarely rational to begin with and we live in a time where the biggest measuring stick for most companies is "what have you done in the last 3 months". There's not a lot of pressure on companies in today's marketplace to do the right thing over the "right now" thing or the fast broken thing or the dumb thing.

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beej71 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree as well. And now they can make slipshod products at 10x speed.

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komali2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We're in a cesspit of business driven development

In a business-driven world with business-driven governments writing business-driven rules, what's the alternative if you want to optimize for success?

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hypeatei 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> We're in a cesspit of business driven development

It's not just businesses doing it either, I regularly see big PRs get merged on open source projects that seem fine on the surface but contain a 1000 paper cuts worth of bugs (not critical, but just enough to annoy you)

On top of that, the code wasn't idiomatic C++ (for this specific project) and the LLM completely ignored available APIs. Sure, it can be fixed, and maintainers should've caught it, but the amount of code being generated requires so much energy on everyone's behalf.