Comment by ethbr1
7 days ago
You're looking at this from a human-centric perspective.
I'm suggesting you consider it from an objective perspective.
It's easily possible for an organization to be more productive with worse developers because of the tools they have access to.
And no, that's not some slight of verbal hand in measuring "productive" -- they are able to ship more value, faster.
> And no, that's not some slight of verbal hand in measuring "productive" -- they are able to ship more value, faster.
Ship more value faster is exactly a verbal slight of hand. That's the statement used by every bad product manager and finance asshole to advocate for shipping out broken code faster. It's more value because more code is more content, but without some form of quality guard rails you run into situations where everything breaks. I've been on teams just like that where suddenly everything collapses and people get mad.
Do you think compilers helped teams ship more value faster from worse developers? IDEs with autocomplete? Linters?
At the end of the day, coders are being paid money to produce something.
It's not art -- it's a machine that works and does a thing.
We can do that in ways that create a greater or lesser maintenance burden, but it's still functional.
LLM coding tools detractors are manufacturing reasons to avoid using another tool that helps them write code.
They need to get over the misconception of what the job is. As another comment previously quipped 'If you want to write artisanal, hand-tuned assembly that's beautiful, do that on your own time for a hobby project.'
> Do you think compilers helped teams ship more value faster from worse developers? IDEs with autocomplete? Linters?
I'm tired of engaging with this false equivalence so I won't. Deterministic systems are not the same.
> It's not art -- it's a machine that works and does a thing.
That's right. But what you need to understand is that the machines we create can and do actively harm people. Leaking secure information, creating software that breaks systems and takes down critical infrastructure. We are engineers first and foremost and artists second. And that means designing systems to be robust and safe. If you can't understand that then you shouldn't be an engineer and should kindly fuck off.
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There is a big difference with compilers. With compilers, the developer still needs to write every single line of code. There is a clear an unambiguous contract between the source code and what gets executed (if it's ambiguous, it is a bug).
The thread here was talking about:
> Well, if everyone uses a calculator, how do we learn math?
The question being whether or not AI will make developers worse at understanding what their code is doing. You can say that "it's okay if a website fails every 100 times, the user will just refresh and we're still more profitable". But wouldn't you agree that such a website is objectively of worse quality? It's cheaper, for sure.
Said differently: would you fly in a plane for which the autopilot was vibe coded? If not, it tells you something about the quality of the code.
Do we always want better code? I don't know. What I see is that the trend is enshittification: more profit, worse products. I don't want that.
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> I'm suggesting you consider it from an objective perspective.
What is objective? That profitability is good? We're destroying our environment to the point where many of us will die from it for the sake of profitability. We're over-using limited natural resources for the sake of profitability. In my book that's not desirable at all.
Companies are profit-maximising machines. The path to more profitability tends to be enshittification: the company makes more money by making it worse for everybody. AI most definitely requires more resources and it seems like those resources will be used to do more, but of lower quality.
Surely that's profitable. But I don't think it is desirable.
Responded to you down below, but will say here that profit is a two-sided coin.
Decreasing the cost of production can lead to more profit or cheaper product prices.
I 100% agree that the trend of quality has been downwards in many things over the past 20 years or so.