Comment by ako
7 days ago
Everything is getting industrialized. We buy most products made in China (tv,laptop, mobile phone etc), furniture is mostly cheap IKEA furniture. Many craftsmen lost their profession to industrialized automation. If we don´t care our furniture is subpar, our products are cheap plastic china products, why do we expect anybody to care about software craftsmanship?
Because the cost of faults is much higher than getting a new bookshelf from IKEA.
When talking about craftsmanship I’m not talking about artisanal, hand crafted source code that is aesthetically pleasing. Nobody but programmers care.
I’m talking about CVEs that allow RCE on your phone so that authoritarian governments can exfiltrate your contact lists and arrest all of the people they suspect of participating in protests that you were involved in.
When companies don’t care about quality and they’re not forced to we end up with slow, surveillance bloatware that is full of security holes and useless features designed to keep us engaged and paying.
I don´t see why industrialized software development with AI Agents could not be better at quality. Medical equipment or airplane safety requirements validations are also done in an industrialized manner. We don't really care if engineers working on these products like what they are doing or they feel like a craftsman.
These have standards, software is the wild west?