[phreeza]

It may be a tragedy, but I fail to see why it is a tragedy of the commons? Which resource that is a available to all is being overused? High-paying dev jobs? Those are not a commons in the sense that tragedy of the commons implies because lower-quality devs don't stand to benefit by only taking a smaller part of the job.

[lhorie]

Here's a food analogy: everyone wants to buy the best looking apples, but then farmers are more incentivized to breed for looks than nutritious value, even though nutritious value is the superior metric.

Similarly, if everyone seeks to "dumb down" programming, you end up with a large pool of "dumbed down" programmers, which is counterproductive precisely because AI is imperfect and you need a higher level of expertise to compensate for its shortcomings. As Kernighan famously said: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." Similarly, if one lets the AI do the thinking in their stead, what hope do they have of being able to debug it?

Ironically, though, programming already suffers from this exact problem in a very fundamental way: every tool exists to make a programmer's life easier, and consequently there are a lot of glue-code programmers. The few that actually impact the industry meaningfully (e.g. most notable software comes out of Bay Area) are very expensive because the supply of experts is limited.

[runnerup]

This actually feels to me like a concept worth exploring. I think we lack a concise term or phrase to reference what GP was trying to communicate.

In my heart I feel similarly to GP - and it does feel a lot like how I feel about tragedy of the commons situations. Maybe there seems to be a shared opportunity for everyone if these private companies would make the most of their financial capital, market dominance, dominance in human resources, and most especially leverage their network effects.

That would lead to better things for everyone, like the invention of smartphones. But the same corporations can also waste unimaginable resources and achieve very little. Often their failures don't just have little effect, but rather the failures choke/smother the market and prevent better alternatives from being widely used.