Comment by boring-human
19 days ago
I agree that there's not a lot of value in your example, but it's the wrong example. AI writing code and humans refining it and maintaining it is probably an inferior proposition, more so if the project is FOSS.
The model I'm referring to is: "if it walks like software and quacks like software, it's software." Its writers and maintainers are AI. It has a commercial purpose. Its value comes from fulfilling its requirements.
There will be human handlers, including some who will occasionally have to dig through the dung and fix AI-idiosyncratic bugs. Fewer Ferrari designers, more Cuban 1956 Buick mechanics. It's an ugly approach, but the conjecture that, economically _or_ technically, there must be something fundamentally broken with it is very hand-wavy and dubious.
I agree that there will be less code-level innovation overall, just like artistic value production took a big hit when we went from portraits to photographs.
> its value comes from fulfilling its requirements.
The requirements will have to come from somewhere, and they will have to be quite precise although probably higher-level than code written today. You're talking about just a new kind of software engineer. The kind of stuff described at https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati... (note the "the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification")
Unless what you have in mind is some sort of Moltbook add-on that the bots would write for themselves.
I'm talking software providing value to humans.