That's why AI is hurting us so much right now.
We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution.
No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure. Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious.
Well now AI is Steve.
It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function.
It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong".
And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software.
We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it.
We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.
But that cost is not trivial. In some topics (but not limited) like medial devices, the legal liability would just bankrupt the company. Not so cheap compared to hiring a few humans. I’m picking an obvious cases here, but there are many others.
> Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure
Ouch, yeah seen this a few times, outside of Scandinavia.
Doesn't sound like a hobby side project. Sounds like a business. And then yeah, you get all that comes with it.
Your customers are paying you $1000 a month to handle a process that is worth $10k to them and might be worth $50k to their customers. If you lose that data you haven’t lost $1000 of data. Even if you only made $100 off of the transaction.
for personal side projects of the "handy SAAS thing that gives all your JSON a lustrous sheen" variety, he's probably more on target that quality seems to have gone by the wayside.