I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.
I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.
Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?
But I think the same applies to not just AI but various tools that have abstracted away the complexity of things over the years.
For example, I would imagine the average person deploying some sort of web app or API today knows far less about networking and infrastructure than someone doing it 10 to 20 years ago.
Compare that to say 30ish years ago. If you wanted to do something as simple as play a computer game you had to know how to navigate a command line, know about device drivers, make a boot disk, etc. Users were a whole lot closer to the realities of what makes computing work. And no internet, at least as we know it now. You really had to have a certain mindset to be a developer.
It's a far cry from "hey Claude make an app."
Once they hit a wall, that is where you find out whether they are motivated or not
Yep. That has to happen first.
Planes falling out of the sky, trains crashing into each other, pacemakers downloading updates and freezing
didn’t we see this with crowdstrike
Then regulators will take things seriously.
Then why did I just spend the last few days releasing a slew of documents for a handful of trivial changes to an ancient medical device?
Someone should have told me that I could just ignore regulations!
gotta get a PE to stamp your LLM-generated code in sensitive environments.
I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.
I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.
There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?
Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.
Something is lost along the way.
Definitely.
My point is more that it seems to have been the way of the world for the past few decades. I’m arguing it’s nothing new, basically a trope at this point.
And once that is said, if we care about it, what do we do about it? Besides just repeating it.
You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.
Progress!
(I’m half kidding)
Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
And for those who might care about these things, they’ll probably just be facing constant pressure to deliver more, faster, perhaps with less.
One of the issue about literacy in algorithms, data modeling, efficiency, development patterns, systems designs… is that people either aren’t aware of them (and in the best case scenario reinvent the wheel), don’t care about them, or feel they aren’t given the time to invest in learning them (or worse, might be penalized for it).
Enlighten us.
Sounds like job prospects to me.