Comment by gchamonlive
6 hours ago
If you took a bad but functional AI generated service and transported it back to 2018 it would have been at worst just mediocre. People do seem forget how dreadful devslop was in the past. I'd take an AI generated mess to disentangle every time over a spaghetti codebase that grew organically in the hands of careless managers.
> People do seem forget how dreadful devslop was in the past.
It was dreadful, but the volume was a single-digit percentage of what you see now.
Even those develoeprs who made a living opying from SO *still needed to make that code work for their system!"
Volume has nothing to do with it, this is discussing code quality. But if you mind me saying so, blame this ridiculous amount of codeslop volume on greedy managers and corpocrats. Developers are artists, they usually ship shitcode when they're under pressure
> Developers are artists
I don't think this has ever, as a rule, been true.
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As far a I can tell, most didn’t bother to see if it worked for the system,p. They just needed to have it compile in their system and then they’d call it done.
If someone was a crappy developer it was also a coin flip if anything actually got shipped. AI will shove it out the door in whatever state it can.
That’s true. But there were also places with very high standards and good design. And the LLM slop is pushing in there as well.
Are the managers of these hypothetical places still interested in keeping the high standards and good design? Enshitification isn't inherent to the technology, if this is what you are deriving from the counterexample, it's a business strategy my dude.
It’s a combination of technical capabilities and human nature / incentives in big companies.
Concepts like good design, security, quality are abstract and hard to measure.
Time, cost, revenue etc are easy to measure. The “quality” people eventually get push aside by the money people.
This is not new, but LLMs further tilt the balance
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But as more and more things depend on increasingly deep software stacks, everything goes to utter shit if the individual systems don't become more reliable.
If you asked management they'd say that's "business risk"
That's a problem of customers stop paying for the product. If the don't then it's a philosophical discussion. I don't like the dilemma because I've been in a company that went bust from years of bungling it couldn't recover from and I wouldn't want to repeat the experience.