[Benjammer]

> the quality really does matter.

If this level of quality/rigor does matter for something like a game, do you think the market will enforce this? If low rigor leads to a poor product, won't it sell less than a good product in this market? Shouldn't the market just naturally weed out the AI slop over time, assuming it's true that "quality really does matter"?

Or were you thinking about "matter" in some other sense than business/product success?

[iamcalledrob]

Yes, I think the market will enforce this. A bit. Eventually. But the time horizon is long, and crummy software with a strong business moat can out-compete great software.

Look at Windows. It's objectively not been a good product for a long time. Its usage is almost entirely down to its moat.

[tabwidth]

How long does that take though? Technical debt from sloppy code doesn't show up in the product until way later. By the time users notice, the team is already three features deep and can't back out.

[tokioyoyo]

All these arguments somehow disregards that we’ve all been adding technical debt left and right, every other day to every single codebase in existence. Humans also write sloppy code.

[mhitza]

Same as when writing notes by hand, the information is internalized. When you pass the thinking to the LLM, you become the copilot that doesn't even know the code, and the minute decisions madd. Good luck rearchitecturing a bad decision in such a design, and prepare your double d6 for a full functionality reroll.

[FridgeSeal]

A lot of software is forced upon people against their will, and purchased bu people who will never use it.

This obscures things in favour of the “quality/performance doesn’t matter argument”.

I am, for example, forced to use a variety of microslop and zoom products. They are unequivocally garbage. Given the option, I would not use them. However, my employer has saddled us with them for reasons, and we must now deal with it.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Even if you're confident you can stop your own company from shipping terrible products, I worry the trend is broad enough and hard enough to audit that the market will enforce it by pulling back on all purchases of such software. If gamers learn that new multiplayer games are just always laggy these days, or CTOs learn that new databases are always less reliable, it's not so easy to convince them that your product is different than the rest.

[theossuary]

Yes, there's every reason to believe the market will weed out the AI slop. The problem is, just like with stocks, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. While we all wait for executives to learn that code rigor matters, we still have bills to pay. After a year when they start trying to hire people to clean up their mess, we'll be the ones having to shovel a whole new level of shit; and the choice will be between that and starving.

As someone who also falls into camp one, and absolutely loves that we have thinking computers now, I can also recognize that we're angling towards a world of hurt over the next few years while a bunch of people in power have to learn hard lessons we'll all suffer for.

[bloppe]

Yes, both the article and GP are making that exact point about it mattering from a customer's perspective.