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We're moving into the 'industrial age of software'. You exact issue, of bespoke, well thought out and well-crafted code is one that craftsmen felt at the beginning of the industrial age. Now, parts are designed and churned out by machines that no one sees or cares about (generally speaking). This is where we are going with software, and production at a truly industrial scale has its place.

And so does well-crafted bespoke software.

The engineers who built the foundation for the industrial expansion of our forefathers went through the same exact thing we're going through now. They look at what existed, and use it to inform their efforts. This is what LLMs do.

I'm not attempting to moralize here, just comment on the parallels. Do I agree that a craftman's work is consumed by the juggernauts and no second thought is given? No. I think its a shame. But I also think the output will never match the artisans that practice now. By the very nature of the machines we employ, we cannot match the skill or thought that goes into bespoke code.

by rspeele9 hours ago|

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It is not even about quality. In fact with an LLM following my orders I can create higher quality code than I ever did before. I always was operating within a budget whether it was defined by the # of hours my customers were willing to pay for, or the # of hours I was personally willing to invest in a side project. This budget manifested in the form of cut features, limited test coverage, limited documentation, and so on. So given the same budget or even a slightly reduced budget I can actually make higher quality software with slop superpowers.

If I spend 2 hours designing the domain model, 1 hour slopping out a rough implementation, and 5 hours polishing it with a combo of handwritten and vibed refactorings, I will get a better result than if I spent 8 hours writing everything by hand.

So my point is not that vibe software is lower quality, as my experience has shown the opposite. It is simply that the spirit of sharing my work was done with the idea that I was sharing it with others who toiled in the same craft, not sharing for consumption by machine. Not that I ever contributed anything very important to the open source world, that anybody depended on. Just personal projects I thought were neat or educational.

In hindsight I would probably still have open sourced what I did, because I think it's valuable to have on record that I competently programmed stuff before AI even existed, like pre-atomic steel. But I don't know if I will open source any personal code going forward.

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To put it more succinctly: if somebody "ripped off" my open source code in 2018, I wasn't mad about that. Even if they didn't bother to attribute me, well, at least they saw my stuff, had a human brain cell light up appreciating it, and thought it was worth stealing. I'm flattered. But with LLMs my work can be reappropriated without a single human ever directly knowing or caring about it.