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I can’t think of another time when software devs had to be •forced• en masse to use a new technology that was supposed to help them. Usually we’re kind of stupid for the shiny new things: jamming them in when they solve nothing, doing unnecessary rewrites just to use the new hotness because it’s so cool and fun. Usually we’re the one trying to shove it down mgmt’s throat (or sneak it by them) rather than the reverse.
But not this time.
7/
Why? The common explanation is that software devs are worried about job security and don’t want to be replaced. And…maybe? But again: past technologies promising greatly improved dev speed we’ve embraced headlong with no regard to large-scale employment effects.
I wonder if this quality vs efficiency thing upthread isn’t a big part of the explanation here.
8/
@inthehands I've heard about this so many times but I've never been so sure of my employment as I am now. Even before the LLM craze the industry was piling up so much complexity that we were barely able to manage it. Now that's been turned up to 11, so we're producing even more complexity with an utter disregard to quality. At some point shit hits the fan and you need someone who actually understand how things work to fix this mess, and boy what a mess are we in.
@inthehands don't forget that we've been focusing a lot on user-facing software development, or web-facing at most. But this is going to end up into all kind of systems we use every day: firmware for your motherboard, graphics card, WiFi & BT adapter, disk controller. Your car. Your phone. Your bank accounting system. Our societies are dependent on computers functioning and we've decided to break them while making ourself virtually unable to fix them.
The “efficiency” pitch I’m describing upthread isn’t really “go faster;” it feels more like “making good things doesn’t matter, what you cared all along about doesn’t really matter, and we don’t think •you• matter.
We always just wanted to built absolute shit, and you always tried to stop us. But now at long last we can.”
9/
I’m kind of speculating here. I get off the LLM coding bus at several earlier stops:
⁃ The energy and water usage are an environmental disaster (so I mostly avoid it for the same reasons I try to reduce my driving).
⁃ The data sourcing is an ethical disaster (so I prefer to avoid it for the same reasons I try to buy fair trade products).
⁃ The people who profit from it at the top are largely horrible (so I’m about as interesting in debating its pros and cons at length as am I debating the work capacity of a Cybertruck).
10/
But that’s me; I don’t think my ethical concerns are shared widely enough for companies to have to be ramming AI down developers’ throats the way they are. The token quotas etc are a symptom of something large and deep.
Maybe that post about MTBF vs MTTR helps explain it.
/end
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