Comment by unknownfuture
31 minutes ago
> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.
I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now.
What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, produce higher quality architectures, etc.
Why?
Because in the past I didn't have the capacity to invest in that kind of hardening, but with AI, now I do.
Of course you'll probably make the claim that my code is probably crap, the tests suck, etc, because you've already made up your mind. But having been in the industry for 25 years, I can tell you definitively that you'd be wrong about that.
Now, what'll happen to the median codebase? God only knows. Maybe I'm especially diligent.
But given we're really only 6-12 months into the agentic coding era, I think the only conclusion you can make is that the jury is still out.
Well said. People love to make everything black and white / good and bad. But things are rarely that simple.
And I get that. I have deeply mixed feelings about these tools, the ethics associated with them, the impact on the industry, on the talent pipeline, etc.
But I also can't deny that they are incredibly powerful tools that are here to stay in one form or another.
And I say that as someone who, a year ago, was absolutely convinced that they were incremental at best and scoffed at everyone who said something like "yeah but they're so much better now!" or "they're only going to get better!"
Well, they were right, they did, and the world has changed. AI generated code is landing in the Linux kernel. 250+ security holes were found and fixed in Firefox. The impact is here and now, and it's mixed and ugly and complicated.