> it will also unlock pretty insane scaling and productivity

Insane scaling of bloat, bugs, and technical debt I'd say.

> We will manage it on either end via requirements and tests

It is so crazy that this is being touted as a sane strategy. When I was a much worse programmer, I tried to write a big complicated string manipulation function to take two types of scripts in a language and add diacritics. I had the requirements very clear. I had the tests very clearly with all the edge cases. But I didn't have a good and clear picture of how to attack the problem which was quite novel for me. As I got closer to passing all the tests it got exponentially more unruly and confusing. And nearing the end I was frantically changing little bits here and there wincing and praying and hoping the tests would pass. "Please work! Come on!" Then when I got close enough, I could never ever think about touching that mess again.

I was a below average programmer then throwing myself at some novel problem I didn't understand. Throwing LLMs that produce below average code at novel problems and relying on tests and requirements is not where we want to go to make real progress.

(Years later after much learning and coding myself I was able to redo the function in a totally different way. This time I actually understood how to attack the strange problem and made something clean, clear, and robust that just worked. The tests then become a secondary guardrail, not the main force of correction.)

We are seeing such a massive regression from what we've learned over the years of CS.

I think all code is technical debt in a way. Good code is a necessary evil, bad code is more evil than necessary.

Generating code automatically when you're not even quite sure what it is or even should be doing is insanity.

I'm not so sure LLM code today is below average. There was a time that things posted to dailywtf were normal everyday stuff

You shared a story of a novice incompetent human programmer and this should tell us that AI is bad at coding.

>Insane scaling of bloat, bugs, and technical debt I'd say.

You just described every legacy codebase. Many of which are widely used and do a lot of sales. You dont need a clean codebase to have a valuable product.

>It is so crazy that this is being touted as a sane strategy.

Re-read what I said. I literally called it crazy.

It is the same dynamic that gave us customer service from some call center in India. Why would companies do this? Customer service got worse. Are they stupid? No, it's just worth it. The quality goes down but the business can scale more so it doesnt matter.

AI will absolutely be good enough at doing things that we'll happily accept some jankiness at times so that we can devote an extra 3000 hours per year per person to other things.

Im not even suggesting its a good thing. I just think the incentive structure dictates it. You're not going to have time to maintain a small slice of some service by hand.