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If you took a bad but functional AI generated service and transported it back to 2018 it would have been at worst just mediocre. People do seem forget how dreadful devslop was in the past. I'd take an AI generated mess to disentangle every time over a spaghetti codebase that grew organically in the hands of careless managers.

by lelanthran3 hours ago|

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> People do seem forget how dreadful devslop was in the past.

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!"

by gchamonlive3 hours ago|

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Volume has nothing to do with it, this is discussing code quality. But if you mind me saying so, blame this ridiculous amount of codeslop volume on greedy managers and corpocrats. Developers are artists, they usually ship shitcode when they're under pressure

by gumby2 hours ago|

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As far a I can tell, most didn’t bother to see if it worked for the system,p. They just needed to have it compile in their system and then they’d call it done.

by Tanjreeve1 hours ago|

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If someone was a crappy developer it was also a coin flip if anything actually got shipped. AI will shove it out the door in whatever state it can.

by lokar3 hours ago|

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That’s true. But there were also places with very high standards and good design. And the LLM slop is pushing in there as well.

by gchamonlive3 hours ago|

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Are the managers of these hypothetical places still interested in keeping the high standards and good design? Enshitification isn't inherent to the technology, if this is what you are deriving from the counterexample, it's a business strategy my dude.

by lokar3 hours ago|

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It’s a combination of technical capabilities and human nature / incentives in big companies.

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

by gchamonlive2 hours ago|

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> 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?

by lokar2 hours ago|

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It means an ambitious manager can take on more work by having the team slop out. They move up (very effective leader!), standards fall, other managers have to match the changes. The bill comes due years later after they have moved on (and up).

by gchamonlive2 hours ago|

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And who pays that bill, actual or technical, is never who created them...

by thfuran2 hours ago|

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But as more and more things depend on increasingly deep software stacks, everything goes to utter shit if the individual systems don't become more reliable.

by gchamonlive2 hours ago|

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If you asked management they'd say that's "business risk"

by Tanjreeve1 hours ago|

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That's a problem of customers stop paying for the product. If the don't then it's a philosophical discussion. I don't like the dilemma because I've been in a company that went bust from years of bungling it couldn't recover from and I wouldn't want to repeat the experience.

by add-sub-mul-div4 hours ago|

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Yeah, a good reason to be touchy about AI is that it tips the balance of power to lazy people who don't want to work or think. On the scale of our whole society. Imagining the ideal responsible use by most others is folly. No matter how responsible and conscientious you, the reader, are with your use of it.