But it’s pretty clear that most people are not. For whatever reasons (mgmt pressure, trying to get ahead, skill issues, etc) they half ass it, accept the 10% (silent) fail rate and blame the bad outcomes on the AI as if that absolves them. Or, adopt the attitude that 10% fail is fine, and people who say otherwise are being picky, or are anti-ai luddites or whatever. You should accept that things will suck.
It was dreadful, but the volume was a single-digit percentage of what you see now.
Even those develoeprs who made a living opying from SO *still needed to make that code work for their system!"
Concepts like good design, security, quality are abstract and hard to measure.
Time, cost, revenue etc are easy to measure. The “quality” people eventually get push aside by the money people.
This is not new, but LLMs further tilt the balance
You speak as if llms had their own minds. Every time anyone talks about AI doing this or that they further reinforce this idea that there isn't a person behind all this. There's always someone watching.
With that said, when you say that llms tilt the balance, who specifically do you say that's driving llms to do that?
I have definitely seen more bafflingly-poor OSS software that just plain doesn't work frequently now than before.
But it's mostly software that wouldn't have existed before because it's trying to do super-niche things. So on the "hobby" side of things, whatever.
But from a "trying to develop software as a business that you want to be a going concern," quality from people who should know better is less tenable than it used to be.
Yes but that's the big thing, now isn't it? These are nice tools, used wisely. But their unwise use, oh boy...
The problem is one needs to be in a situation where the incentive is towards quality rather than speed. But that situation rather rare now - thirty years ago, Microsoft won the office wars with crap that had features. And nothing has fundamentally changed in web development since the LPad crisis.
The problem is those companies whose incentive is to allow bugs where it's the involuntary users who suffer will bite you no matter what quality you make your own software.