Comment by rednafi

It’s easy to forget that any artifact - painting, music, text, or software - that appeals to a large number of people is, by definition, an average on the spectrum of quality.

Popular music tends to be generic. Popular content is mostly brainrot these days. Popular software is often a bloated mess because most users’ lives don’t revolve around software. They use software to get something done and move on.

I never understood the appeal of “craft” in software. Early computer pioneers were extremely limited by the tech of their time, so the software they hacked together felt artsy and crafty. Modern software feels industrial because it is industrial - it’s built in software factories.

Industrial software engineers don’t get paid to do art. There are research groups that do moonshot experiments, and you can be part of that if it’s your thing. But lamenting the lack of craft in industrial software is kind of pointless. Imagine if we’d stopped at crafty, handmade auto engines and never mass-produced them at scale. We don’t lament “crafty engines” anymore. If you want that, go buy a supercar.

Point is: AI is just another tool in the toolbox. It’s like Bash, except calling it that won’t pull in billions of dollars in investment. So “visionaries” call it ghost in the machine, singularity, overlord, and whatnot. It produces mediocre work and saves time writing proletariat software that powers the world. Crafty code doesn’t pay the bills.

But I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek out fun in computing. We absolutely should. It’s just that criticizing AI for not being able to produce art is an old thing. The goalpost keeps shifting, and these tools keep crushing it.

I don’t use AI to produce craft, because I don’t really do craft in software - I have other hobbies for that. But I absolutely, proudly use it to generate mediocre code that touches millions of people’s lives in some way.