Comment by 20k

I work in tech, and I think the worst part is seeing all the pieces of catastrophe that have had to come together to make AI dominate

There's several factors which are super depressing:

1. Economic productivity, and what it means for a company to be successful have become detached from producing good high quality products. The stock market is the endgame now

2. AI is attempting to strongly reject the notion that developers understanding their code is good. This is objectively wrong, but its an intangible skill that makes developers hard to replace, which is why management is so desperate for it

3. Developers had too much individual power, and AI feels like a modern attempt at busting the power of the workforce rather than a genuine attempt at a productivity increase

4. It has always been possible to trade long term productivity for short term gains. Being a senior developer means understanding this tradeoff, and resisting management pressure to push something out NOW that will screw you over later

5. The only way AI saves time in the long term is if you don't review its output to understand it as well as if you'd written it yourself. Understanding the code, and the large scale architecture is critical. Its a negative time savings if you want to write high-long-term-productivity code, because we've introduced an extra step

6. Many developers simply do not care about writing good code unfortunately, you just crank out any ol' crap. As long as you don't get fired, you're doing your job well enough. Who cares about making a product anymore, it doesn't matter. AI lets you do a bad job with much less effort than before

7. None of this is working. AI is not causing projects to get pushed out faster. There are no good high quality AI projects. The quality of code is going down, not up. Open source software is getting screwed

Its an extension of the culture where performance doesn't matter. Windows is all made of react components which are each individually a web browser, because the quality of the end product no longer matters anymore. Software just becomes shittier, because none of these companies actually care about their products. AAA gaming is a good example of this, as is windows, discord, anything google makes, IBM, Intel, AMD's software etc

A lot of this is a US problem, because of the economic conditions over there and the prevalence of insane venture capitalism and union busting. I have a feeling that as the EU gets more independent and starts to become a software competitor, the US tech market is going to absolutely implode