Comment by madduci
3 days ago
The real.answer is that people stopped making things with care and genuine interest.
Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible.
This is a recipe for creating a mess, in which AI has now pushed the limits and we are seeing how failure is now per-default embedded and shipped to users, who are now beta-testing products continuously.
> Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible.
because companies that did this is rewarded with more users and more revenue (than a hypothetical competitor that didnt). Darwinian natural selection is about survival of the fittest, not survival of the "best looking" or "best performing". And the determination of fitness is by the actions of consumers, not what they state verbally.
This happens because of capitalism.
In a few years will have a cemetery of software and products locked behind DRM or requiring a remote connection to a server that won't exist anymore, because it's too expensive to maintain. It is already happening, the effect will be much more amplified sooner
The days where middle and high-end goods were of a relatively higher quality were also produced under a capitalist system, though. The US was capitalist when it built my parents' normal washer/dryer combination that lasted for 25 years with no interruptions to service, and it was capitalist when Google was first invented and you could conduct literal string searches on the internet. I don't think there's anything inherent to "capitalism" that causes degradation of product lines that doesn't also cause the creation of the product lines in the first place.
My suspicion is that the "great enshittification" has more to do with the swelling in numbers and purchasing/borrowing power of the lower classes. The middle class now has worse computers and dryers [1], but the lower class now has computers and dryers. Corporations can still make colossal sales numbers with degraded products because they're selling to people for whom possessing a product at all is a major life upgrade, and aren't worried about "the best version of this product". The same is happening to movies and TV.
[1] Many will point out that on paper and in certain metrics modern goods outperform past goods, but I think the extremely high prices commanded by quality vintage and near-vintage goods across all genres of product lines speaks for itself.
We have been beta-testing the outcome of incompetent software production processes long before AI. But LLMs do accelerate the slop production. And if what you're shipping is going to be a bloated buggy mess anyway, then LLMs really do make you more "productive".