[csallen]

I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good.

I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.

[camdenreslink]

Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.

[csallen]

Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.

[pessimizer]

What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to?

Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger?

Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and millions of words. This is a direct result of the printing press. Just as there are television shows that have run with continuous plots for thousands of hours. This is a consequence of video recording and production technologies; you couldn't do that with stage plays.

You seem to be trying to slip "smaller in scope" into your statement without backing, even though I'd insist that applications individuals wrote being "smaller in scope" was a obvious consequence of the tooling available. I can't know everything, so I have to keep the languages and techniques limited to the ones that I do know, and I can't write fast enough to make things huge. The problems I choose to tackle are based on those restrictions.

Those are the exact things that LLMs are meant to change.

[csallen]

The average piece written and published today today is much shorter than the average piece from the past. Look at Twitter. Social media in general. Internet forums. Blog posts. Emails. Chats. Etc. The amount of this content DWARFS other content.

The same is true of most things that get democratized. Look at video. TikTok, YouTube, YouTube shorts.

Look at all the apps people are building are building for themselves with AI. They are typically not building Microsoft Word.

Of course there will be some apps that are bigger and more ambitious than ever. I myself am currently building an app that's bigger an more ambitious than I would have tried to build without AI. I'm well aware of this use case.

But as many have pointed out, AI is worse at these than at smaller apps. And pretending that these are the only apps that matter is what's leading developers imo to over-value the importance of code quality. What's happening right now that's invisible to most professional engineers is an explosion in the number of time, bespoke personal applications being quickly built by non-developers are that are going to chip away at people's reasons to buy and use large, bloated, professional software with hundreds of thousands of users.

[camdenreslink]

> Look at all the apps people are building are building for themselves with AI.

The apps those people were making before LLMs became ubiquitous were no apps. So by definition they are now larger and more ambitious.

[leptons]

There's already been an explosion of apps - and most of them suck, are spam, or worse, will steal your data.

We don't need more slop apps, we already have that and have for years.

[theshrike79]

Yes, some people are pushing everything-apps.

But just as many are creating One More Habit Tracker or Todo App, so many that Apple had to change their review guidelines to block the surge of low-tier app slop.

Internally people are creating bespoke tools for themselves to fix issues in their daily workflows that would've either been a 100k€ software project that lasts for 6 months or required an expensive SaaS system with 420 extra features they didn't need - and the price to match.

[tadfisher]

The Jevons paradox says otherwise. As producing apps becomes cheaper, we will not be able to help ourselves: we will make them larger until they fill all available space and cost just as much to produce and maintain.

[csallen]

That's the incorrect application of the Jevons Paradox. We won't get bigger apps, we'll get more apps.

Think about what happened to writing when we went from scribes to the printing press, and from the printing press to the web. Books and essays didn't get bigger. We just got more people writing.