I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass.
Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.
Are they going to mirror every tool software engineers were used to for decades, but in a mangled/proprietary form?
I think to become really efficient they'll have to invent new programming language to eliminate all the ambiguity and non-determinism. Call it "prompt language", with ai-subroutines, ai-labels and ai-goto.
What if that AI was trained to hide implementation as much as possible? E.g. by making the client as thin as possible, using OAuth for authentication, following some robust template, would it be better?
Avoiding such low-hanging-fruit disasters is doable and major players have incentives to fix it.
This however wouldn't change the goal - replace all software engineers with DIY nephews with LLM in their hands.
Even worse - people start thinking it's infeasible to learn hard things, because it prevents you from moving fast, from one domain to another.
My area of expertise is cryptography-adjacent. Non-trivial fraction of students think that cryptography and security is a dead-end skill as all companies in this area are being replaced with AI. I asked them to implement web-bot-auth as simple as possible, because I know how AI can read specification and follow it.
Back in Eastern Europe I frequently visited public "sauna" with my parents. It included jumping into freezing water after three heat sessions and the only thing you feel is just tingling in your skin. During those years all my respiratory illnesses were very brief and never affected lower areas (like bronchitis). The very first year I've emigrated I've got pneumonia and needed antibiotics twice during the cold season. The doctor told me it's just different viruses and I didn't have immunity for those (which is ridiculous considering globalization and I wasn't in an isolated tribe before).
For my parents though I think it was net health negative as public sauna was always accompanied with a lot of alcohol.
I treat the code I produce as my craft and I appreciate I can afford it and enjoy the output.
I know engineers who aren't that lucky and struggle in "enterprise" software development, where slop was a feature for decades - people making decisions won't use the software (their low paid employees will) and software monstrosities need a hell a lot of support which sometimes brings more revenue than the original purchase.
Many comments about code quality being irrelevant.
I'd agree if it was launch-and-forget scenario.
But this code has to be maintained and expanded with new features. Things like lack of comments, dead code, meaningless variable names will result in more slop in future releases, more tokens to process this mess every time (like paying tech-debt results in better outcomes in emerging projects).
I often searched BIFL sub-reddit to find things quality things and it did fail me in the past. After years of broken dishware created a weird collection, I followed the BIFL advice and bought Corelle glass dishes. Only three years later of daily heavy use and dishwasher all the dishes have degraded edge, which looks and feels just like chipped glass.
Looking through specialized forums helps sometimes, but then you are looking at Hermès dishware and doubting what are you paying for - quality or art.
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