Comment by dijit

This topic is so hot that this comment will be impossible to find, but I really want to add my take because I so rarely see my specific concerns mentioned.

Every single technological improvement that has helped "developers" in the last 16 years has been worse for users (with very few exceptions).

I tried constantly to reconcile why this is a fact, but I find it hard because I don't "speak" finance, I don't "speak" PM, and I don't "speak" sales.

I only speak: goals of the product, outcomes for users and dependability of my service, and those aren't the drivers of business decisions.

My industry niche has been reliability, and I've all but seen my role be eliminated because nobody wants to pay for things to work properly, they don't want to pay for the friction of someone slowing the gears of business in order to actually satisfy uptime or performance requirements: unless they're forced to.

There's a pattern that once you notice you can't stop seeing;

Every abstraction layer that saves developer time has a direct cost to users; in latency, in memory, in compute.

Sometimes that cost is direct, sometimes it's laundered through your cloud bill and passed quietly downstream. But it's always there.

If you build your programs using electron, they're laggy unless you're on a <3y mid-level machine or greater they use copious amount of memory and they don't even integrate with accessibility toolchains of the system itself.

Heavy web-frameworks exhaust compute so completely that we have to run complex orchestration systems and deployment schemes to operate them now, what was once considered slow because it was interpreted is now many orders of magnitude slower anyway due to those orchestration overheads. We run containers, on VMs, inside of dedicated sandboxes, on generic CPUs with low single-core clock speeds, on expensive vendors..

An issue that compounds.

.. to save developer time from writing something more efficient, to build quickly, find a market and "figure it out never".

You can, as a developer: enjoy these times, because each of these improvements saves you from drudge work. But make no mistake, they want to minimise the amount of time you spend making things because they want to employ less of you.

AI is just another step in this direction. LLMs generate passable code, it's not good, I will definitely have to go in and clean it up when it inevitably fails. You will generate your first $10M with a good idea, but then you'll hit a scaling issue and I will have to come in and add to my grey hairs: and you will resent me the entire time I am helping you.

AI will make worse things more ubiquitous. Eventually the public won't even want to use technology, because we made it so fucking awful.