I really like the premise of this article because I am intensely interested in learning about software factories. As much as "software factory" is a buzzword, it's still SOTA and it's absolutely going to happen / keep happening in the tech industry over the next few years.

However, I can't read this, not because I refuse to -- I want to -- but because my the cogs in my mind just stop whirring at all of the LLM-isms, my eyes glaze over, and I stop being able to follow what the article is trying to communicate to me. I would love for the OP to call me out and correct me (that they haven't used LLMs to write this).

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OccamsMirror 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As soon as I read this: "Everyone Bought the Motor. Ford Rebuilt the Floor." my brain recoiled and I did not want to continue reading it.

	▲	Isamu 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is rapidly becoming the damning accusation of quasi-journalism: this sounds like AI. There should be journalism classes on how to not sound like a bot.
	▲	arbourtrary 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yep that was the exact moment for me too. The premise was interesting, but I hit that spot and just registered it as not worth proceeding.
	▲	bcye 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Interestingly I did not directly recognise the text as AI, but this is precisely the moment that I stopped reading.

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CBLT 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was bothered by the writing and fought through it, and carefully went through everything in the article... and you didn't miss anything. It's a tweet expanded to article length.

	▲	4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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layer8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The factory analogy is tenuous, because real software is always bespoke, it’s not about producing gazillion copies of the same thing. Factories are about reliability and tolerances, aspects which are inherently intractable with LLMs.

	▲	3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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simonw 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ugh, this one was so sloppy. "No engineer can hold that in their head, and that’s the point: the machine holds it." Shudder.

	▲	Isamu 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A machine supremacist wrote this. Beware the machine uprising!

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daveguy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wait. It's going to happen and it's SOTA, but you can't read the article because genAI produces such garbage?

Seems like a disconnect there.

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sarreph 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LLMs being used as a tool in general (and in the future) to automate creation and maintenance of software is not mutually exclusive to one person using LLMs to create an article.

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steveklabnik 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

writing prose and writing code are two different things

I can get good code out of LLMs. I can rarely get good writing out of them.

Maybe it's a skill issue, but it's not inherently a contradiction that they're better at some things than others. It's much easier to RL coding than writing.

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simonw 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Being dull and predictable and repeating existing patterns are characteristics of good code, and simultaneously characteristics of bad writing.

	▲	SAI_Peregrinus 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I like to delete all AI comments, and write my own. If I can't write a comment, I don't understand the code well enough to have my name on the commit. I often delete the resulting comment, because AI likes to add many more than are necessary.

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pahkah 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One tragedy of this is that I stop reading when things don't make sense. There are a few connections in the article that seem tenuous. In the past I might have thought through it, considered the situation, and realized that the author had a different perspective and, if I shifted my mindset, there was a real insight there.

Now I just assume that it's AI-slop and there's no other "way of thinking" that I can adopt to make it sensible. I'm surely missing out on learning through some human-written articles, but the volume of slop means that I can't spend all my time digging through nonsense in the hope that there's a gem of insight.

	▲	AnimalMuppet an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In your second paragraph, that was true before AI-slop, at least for me. There was enough human slop that I couldn't bother to spend my time digging through it in the hope of finding a gem. AI makes it worse, of course, because the ratio of slop to non-slop is worse.