[wccrawford]

AI is different because it's a tool, and the user of the tool is responsible for the work performed.

An outsourced developer isn't a "tool". They're a human being, and responsible for their actions. They're being paid, and they either act responsibly or they get replaced.

A vibe coder is a human using a tool. The human is responsible for code quality, and if it's not good enough, they need to keep using the tool to make it better. That means understanding the tool's output.

If an artist used Photoshop to create a billboard ad that was ugly, they don't get to blame Photoshop. They have to keep using the tool until their output is good.

[IanCal]

I don’t find “but who is to blame, ultimately?” All that useful.

So you figure out that someone you paid is at fault, instead of someone they hired. Your contract is with them so what really changes? What process or anything else is really different between it being a company with a manager who asks a team of devs and a company which asks an AI agent, to you as a customer?

Maybe it changes who gets fired or sued or whether one insurance or another pays out- but broadly I think none of what I said about project work really changes.

Product owners and hell even customers have been able to get software they don’t understand all the details of or for customers even get to see the code, purely driven with natural language.

[CoastalCoder]

> An outsourced developer isn't a "tool".

I'd think that depends on the model of responsibility at play.

For example, suppose I hire a building contractor to build a house, and the electrician he subcontracts makes mistake.

From my perspective, the prime contractor is equally responsible for that mistake regardless of whether he used a subcontractor, or did the work himself but used a broken tool.

This doesn't make the electrician any less of a "person" in the deeply important ways, but it's not a distinction that's relevant to my handling of the problem.

[kelvinjps10]

But in internally it would work the same for this contractor as this subcontractor would either learn or get replaced