There has always been some level of misalignment between the (beauty of high) quality of products made by craftsmen and the value of these products by whoever consumes them.<p>If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.<p>Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.<p>Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took week, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here).<p>This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.
30 years in the industry for me. It’s been a wild last few years watching this transformation. Like the OP I find it wholly unpleasant and I also can’t deny the productivity boost. I’m very glad I’m nearly ready for retirement and I look forward to watching this “progress” from a comfortable distance.
For a hundred years software was inscrutable enough to normies that you could be an artisan. But most professions haven't had that luxury for a long, long time. Try making and selling pretty much anything else you built by hand.<p>Now it's software people's turn to feel the pain of being a starving artist and watch as your attractive friends with no skills and a social media presence "make it" with their genius.<p>We haven't even begun to feel the weight of it yet.
I anticipate and welcome the market price of slopware dropping to zero, given that it’s now in infinite supply.
Too much talent has been cohabiting with SO copypasters, MBA idiots, and management dorks for too long, time to break up.
>I’d love to find a corner of the world where this hasn’t happened yet [...]<p>Start one?<p>There's definitely a market for software that doesn't give off the corporate, mass-produced, one-size-fits-all energy. 37signals famously made quite a business out of it.
After we get through this slop phase, I think software engineering won’t be about code at all, if it even exists as a profession. Feels like the beginning of the end for the craft.
No way. It's simply another layer of abstraction. You don't code in binary, or assembly, or C, or vanilla JavaScript anymore.<p>Eventually "coding" will simply be prompting skill with the wisdom of architectural decisions.<p>That's also one way to describe what it's like to code with React et al these days, anyway. Component/hook selection skill with the wisdom of architectural decisions.
The meaning of code will change. Maybe it will get a new name.<p>Software hasn't been about "real code" (asm) for a long time; yes, this was a common opinion when HLL's and compilers were starting.
> “real code” (asm)<p>You meant actual bytecode?<p>Assembly doesn’t exactly map to in 1:1. x86’s mov eax, ebx is the classic example that has two ways of being encoded. Not to mention sections, labels and all the other fancies.
It's strange to see this on the site:<p>> While I may use AI for work, my website, and all the content on it, is entirely written by hand.<p>I mean, if you're tired of the slop and what AI is doing to the industry, why do you need to use it for a simple personal website?
I'm saying my site and everything on it is written manually.
Hes saying his site is written by hand
I think they are saying they didn't use AI for it.
Yup, just a problem of a misplaced comma I think.Let me rephrase it : "AI is used for work, but my website, and all the content in it, is entirely written by hand."
I wonder why your comment gets upvotes until getting to the top.
Or simply:<p>"While I may use AI for work, my website and all the content on it is entirely written by hand."<p>I don't think the original syntax is incorrect exactly, but too many commas in a sentence can make it harder to parse, which is why style guides often warn about it and advise thinking of certain commas as "optional."