I just registered my kid for fall school athletics, and now feel like Heracles returning from the underworld with Cerberus on his back.
WOW is that online registration platform bad software.
1/3
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The software in question is Arbiter Sports (arbitersports.com).
The headliner among the •numerous• software flaws I encountered in this single registration process: the site fails form validation when making subsequent edits — or no edits, just resaving unchanged! — to a form that the system •had already accepted•.
The only user-visible message is “Required Information Missing.” (There was no required info missing; again, it already passed validation.) The problem, visible only in the Javascript console, was that the site was rejecting non-alphanumeric characters in a phone number it had pulled from its own database.
The fix was to make some keystrokes in the offending field to force the site’s Javascript to re-sanitize it for the back end.
2/3
I’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.
I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.
We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and even more severe forms of personal harm. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but LLMs drove it to fever pitch. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that fact probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.
3/3
OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.
Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:
(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future
(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore
While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:
(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use out software and derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, and you can't fight to make it matter”
I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.
4/3
There is another problem.
Software developers (often) work on teams, and LLMs drastically change the nature of work flows and works loads on teams, and there are winners and losers.
Without AI, problems and issues are often small and incremental, and on functional teams, senior people can handle them, teaching as they go.
With AI, there is a tsunami of code embedded rapidly into code bases that is essentially unreviewable.
Senior people who are used to fixing things and teaching the juniors are now disciplining themselves to say to the juniors, things like, This is a pile of unreviewable crap, tell the LLM to start over, and use Django this time."
The ability to treat LLMs poorly and inefficiently is spilling over into how we treat each other.
@inthehands It seems like software engineering could really borrow a lot from other engineering fields. Build a professional organization with certifications and licensing and ethics. Formalize continuing education and licensure requirements. Put your license on the line for the work you perform. And where you can, unionize.
I work with a bunch of mechanical and electrical engineers who work their asses off to make sure a vending machine won't become a projectile in an 8G acceleration. Yet we have no end of problems getting the software on the HVAC to not go into Maxxximum Extreme HyperCooling mode to bring the cabin temperature to a 74F setpoint when the passenger doors open and bring in a wave of 75F outside air.
@Rgsharpe @inthehands
When I changed career from a more mature engineering branch into software dev I were amazed over what a mess it is. Half dev thinks they are artist and should not be bothered by consumers needs and opinions and the other half is tech-bro cowboys that have a difficult time to even recognize that other humans exists and have any relevance for them. (a bit of hyperbole, but not much)
@GoblinQuester @Rgsharpe @inthehands
💯 Just try building a bridge the way they build software applications.
Put more concisely:
I’d bet money that developer reaction to LLM-driven development would be •very• different if its practical effect were to force management to slow down development and sink more money into quality.
5/3
@inthehands thank you for putting so eloquently how I feel – as a designer who codes more than as a developer’s developer.
The phrase I come back to, as my attempt to encapsulate it, is *the lack of care economy*.
That’s always been underlying financialised modernity but it’s currently running unabashedly rampant
@inthehands hear hear. What I wonder is.... don't these companies see the $ effects of, for example, having broken registration processes? Doesn't the bottom line get affected by broken software, or am I just a total rube who understands nothing? (Granted, both could be true)
“Doesn't the bottom line get affected by broken software?”
Ah, the trillion-dollar question.
Under consumer capitalism, in a competitive market? Yes.
Under investor capitalism, in a world of monopoly and capture and extraction? No, no it does not.
For things like child athletic registration, you have to do it once per season and once you've sorted out what time and place and with whom your kid is going to play, you're not going to switch leagues or academies or whatever just because the registration software was crap.
The really irksome thing is that crap forms are of course nothing new, but for most of the decade of the teens improvements in software made it easier for a basic programmer to write good, functional forms with good validation and sound error messages.
Now we're going hard into reverse because no one wants to even pay a basic software dev anymore and bosses have decided that no one cares.
