Comment by leptons
3 hours ago
We still pay our software developers the same amount, but now an AI is the middleman taking more and more money (in the form of tokens) every day. With every new model, more tokens are consumed so the new model can "think" more. Nobody's even really reading or reviewing the code the AI produces, so software quality goes down, and we're paying more to produce it. And when there's a serious problem with the code? No human is going to dig through the mess the AI created - so burn even more tokens/money trying to get the AI to fix it, or just start over from scratch again with the AI, hoping for better results. It's the definition of insanity. I'm looking for a new job, maybe even a new industry, a new career path - after 30 years in this industry, software development is jumping the shark.
The current crop of big influential companies is old and super bureaucratic, possibly with the exception of Apple which from the outside seems to have less bureaucracy.
I’ve been wondering whether 2006 Google, Amazon, Facebook would be acting like this if LLMs were launched back then, or if these companies are just due for getting replaced and this is just their big mistake making phase. Prior big companies also entered a big mistake making phase, the mistakes just looked different because different era etc.
We’ve already lived through multiple floods of unmaintainable code, eg with unstructured JQuery.
New tech stacks will appear and they will handle the mess to some extent.