6 ms·

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit: sentence fixed.

lxgr 10mo ago
> The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- knollimar 10mo ago
  There's a buge difference between possible and likely. Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
  - lxgr 10mo ago
    Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it. The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.
    - vrighter 10mo ago
      what is (and I'm being generous with the base here) 0.95^10? A 10-step process with a 95% success rate on each.
- goldeneas 10mo ago
  > Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs That's obvious. It's a matter of which makes it more likely
- pacifika 10mo ago
  Yeah it’s interesting to see if blaming LLMs becomes as acceptable as “caused by a technical fault” to deflect responsibility from what is a programmer’s output. Perhaps that’s what lead to a decline in accountability and quality.
  - lxgr 10mo ago
    The decline in accountability has been in progress for decades, so LLMs can obviously not have caused it. They might of course accelerate it if used unwisely, but the solution to that is arguably to use them wisely, not to completely shun them because "think of the craft and the jobs". And yes, in some contexts, using them wisely might well mean not using them at all. I'd just be surprised if that were a reasonable default position in many domains in 5-10 years.
- bluefirebrand 10mo ago
  > Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs. Is Good Engineering possible with LLMs? I remain skeptical.
afro88 10mo ago
I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in the face of a lot of previously unaffordable goods now broadly available and affordable. You can still buy high goods made with care when it matters to you, but that's the exception. It will be the same with software. A lot of what we use will be mass produced with AI, and even produced in realtime on the fly (in 5 years maybe?). There will be some things where we'll pay a premium for software crafted with care, but for most it won't matter because of the benefits of rapidly produced software. We've got a glimpse of this with things like Claude Artifacts. I now have a piece of software quite unique to my needs that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't care that it's one big js file. It works and it's what I need and I got it pretty much for free. The capability of things like Artifacts will continue to grow and we'll care less and less that it wasn't human produced with care.
- kiba 10mo ago
  Poor quality is not synonymous with mass production. It's just cheap crap made with little care.
- fileeditview 10mo ago
  While a general "crashing down" probably will not happen I could imagine some differences to other mass produced goods. Most of our private data lives in clouds now and there are already regular security nightmares of stolen passwords, photos etc. I fear that these incidents will accumulate with more and more AI generated code that is most likely not reviewed or reviewed by another AI. Also regardless of AI I am more and more skipping cheap products in general and instead buying higher quality things. This way I buy less but what I buy doesn't (hopefully) break after a few years (or months) of use. I see the same for software. Already before AI we were flooded with trash. I bet we could all delete at least half of the apps on our phones and nothing would be worse than before. I am not convinced by the rosy future of instant AI-generated software but future will reveal what is to come.
carlosjobim 10mo ago
Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for? But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization. There's exactly one good invoicing app I've found which is good for freelancers and small businesses. While the amount of potential customers are in the tens of millions. Why aren't there at least 10 good competitors? My impression is that programmers consider it to be below their dignity to work on simple software which solves real problems and are great for their niche. Instead it has to be big and complicated, enterprise-scale. And if they can't get a job doing that, they will pretend to have a job doing that by spending their time making open source software for enterprise-scale problems. Instead of earning a very good living by making boutique software for paying users.
- fileeditview 10mo ago
  I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable. I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do. You mention invoicing and I think: there must be hundreds of apps for what you describe but maybe I am wrong. What is the one good app you mention? I am curious now :)
  - carlosjobim 10mo ago
    There's a whole bunch of apps for invoicing, but if you try them, you'll see that they are excessively complicated. Probably because they want to cover all bases of all use cases. Meaning they aren't great for any use case. Like you say. The invoicing app in particular I was referring to is Cakedesk. Made by a solo developer who sells it for a fair price. Easy to use and has all the necessary functions. Probably the name and the icon is holding him back, though. As far as I understand, the app is mostly a database and an Electron/Chromium front-end, all local on your computer. Probably very simple and uninteresting for a programmer, but extremely interesting for customers who have a problem to solve.

lxgr 10mo ago

> The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
knollimar 10mo ago
There's a buge difference between possible and likely. Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
- lxgr 10mo ago
  Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it. The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.
  - vrighter 10mo ago
    what is (and I'm being generous with the base here) 0.95^10? A 10-step process with a 95% success rate on each.
goldeneas 10mo ago
> Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs That's obvious. It's a matter of which makes it more likely
pacifika 10mo ago
Yeah it’s interesting to see if blaming LLMs becomes as acceptable as “caused by a technical fault” to deflect responsibility from what is a programmer’s output. Perhaps that’s what lead to a decline in accountability and quality.
- lxgr 10mo ago
  The decline in accountability has been in progress for decades, so LLMs can obviously not have caused it. They might of course accelerate it if used unwisely, but the solution to that is arguably to use them wisely, not to completely shun them because "think of the craft and the jobs". And yes, in some contexts, using them wisely might well mean not using them at all. I'd just be surprised if that were a reasonable default position in many domains in 5-10 years.
bluefirebrand 10mo ago
> Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs. Is Good Engineering possible with LLMs? I remain skeptical.

afro88 10mo ago

I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in the face of a lot of previously unaffordable goods now broadly available and affordable. You can still buy high goods made with care when it matters to you, but that's the exception. It will be the same with software. A lot of what we use will be mass produced with AI, and even produced in realtime on the fly (in 5 years maybe?). There will be some things where we'll pay a premium for software crafted with care, but for most it won't matter because of the benefits of rapidly produced software. We've got a glimpse of this with things like Claude Artifacts. I now have a piece of software quite unique to my needs that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't care that it's one big js file. It works and it's what I need and I got it pretty much for free. The capability of things like Artifacts will continue to grow and we'll care less and less that it wasn't human produced with care.

kiba 10mo ago
Poor quality is not synonymous with mass production. It's just cheap crap made with little care.
fileeditview 10mo ago
While a general "crashing down" probably will not happen I could imagine some differences to other mass produced goods. Most of our private data lives in clouds now and there are already regular security nightmares of stolen passwords, photos etc. I fear that these incidents will accumulate with more and more AI generated code that is most likely not reviewed or reviewed by another AI. Also regardless of AI I am more and more skipping cheap products in general and instead buying higher quality things. This way I buy less but what I buy doesn't (hopefully) break after a few years (or months) of use. I see the same for software. Already before AI we were flooded with trash. I bet we could all delete at least half of the apps on our phones and nothing would be worse than before. I am not convinced by the rosy future of instant AI-generated software but future will reveal what is to come.

carlosjobim 10mo ago

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for? But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization. There's exactly one good invoicing app I've found which is good for freelancers and small businesses. While the amount of potential customers are in the tens of millions. Why aren't there at least 10 good competitors? My impression is that programmers consider it to be below their dignity to work on simple software which solves real problems and are great for their niche. Instead it has to be big and complicated, enterprise-scale. And if they can't get a job doing that, they will pretend to have a job doing that by spending their time making open source software for enterprise-scale problems. Instead of earning a very good living by making boutique software for paying users.

fileeditview 10mo ago
I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable. I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do. You mention invoicing and I think: there must be hundreds of apps for what you describe but maybe I am wrong. What is the one good app you mention? I am curious now :)
- carlosjobim 10mo ago
  There's a whole bunch of apps for invoicing, but if you try them, you'll see that they are excessively complicated. Probably because they want to cover all bases of all use cases. Meaning they aren't great for any use case. Like you say. The invoicing app in particular I was referring to is Cakedesk. Made by a solo developer who sells it for a fair price. Easy to use and has all the necessary functions. Probably the name and the icon is holding him back, though. As far as I understand, the app is mostly a database and an Electron/Chromium front-end, all local on your computer. Probably very simple and uninteresting for a programmer, but extremely interesting for customers who have a problem to solve.