Comment by csallen
6 hours ago
I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good.
I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.
Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.
Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.
What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to?
Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger?
Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and millions of words. This is a direct result of the printing press. Just as there are television shows that have run with continuous plots for thousands of hours. This is a consequence of video recording and production technologies; you couldn't do that with stage plays.
You seem to be trying to slip "smaller in scope" into your statement without backing, even though I'd insist that applications individuals wrote being "smaller in scope" was a obvious consequence of the tooling available. I can't know everything, so I have to keep the languages and techniques limited to the ones that I do know, and I can't write fast enough to make things huge. The problems I choose to tackle are based on those restrictions.
Those are the exact things that LLMs are meant to change.
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The Jevons paradox says otherwise. As producing apps becomes cheaper, we will not be able to help ourselves: we will make them larger until they fill all available space and cost just as much to produce and maintain.
That's the incorrect application of the Jevons Paradox. We won't get bigger apps, we'll get more apps.
Think about what happened to writing when we went from scribes to the printing press, and from the printing press to the web. Books and essays didn't get bigger. We just got more people writing.