[MarkSweep]

I suspect you are right that LLM-generated software will likely negatively impact people's lives. The flip side of this is there is going to be a lot of software generated that would have never been possible before. And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software. I think it's hard to predict whether on net this will be a good or bad thing.

[20k]

>And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software

The best use case i've seen for AI is people generating random one shot projects for themselves, which is honestly so cool. You can make some basic app that does something very specific, that would have taken objectively a lot longer to make by hand. This is when 'crappy' software is more than good enough for a specific problem

[castedo]

Similar use cases of useful AI one-shot projects are: demos, proof-of-concept, prototype, exploratory tests, etc... I've AI-generated an HTML/javascript craplet to test how browser security would behave for certain JavaScript API calls. I just wanted to confirm how browser security would behave before I started to spend time hand-coding the non-AI quality software that I wanted to release.

And I say this as somebody who generally has a low opinion of AI generated code and rarely uses it. But it has its place.

[josephg]

I was listening to a podcast talking about this the other day. They encouraged non-programmers to use LLMs to make working demos of the features they wanted to have. A demo is a much more powerful communication tool than a written description. Speaking as an engineer, a working demo makes a way better spec to work off than 100 pages of words. Even if the code itself will be completely rewritten.

I think this is a wonderful use case for LLMs. Who knows if regular people will try it out. We've spent decades making people feel like software is some special techy thing that regular mortals should stay away from. LLMs make it easy for anyone to turn an idea into a prototype.