[staticshock]

Everything is search.

Software development is search through the space of useful/interesting automations. Business is search for product market fit (at the intersection of expertise, capital, problem, etc.) Writing is search for lossless, efficient idea transfer.

AI software development is more search. If we search more, will we find a bunch of garbage? Hell yes. We'll find a TON of garbage. That's not new, though. The world has been writing way more books than you'll ever read, recording more music you'll ever hear, filming more television shows than you'll ever get to watch, etc. A lot of it is garbage, but the good stuff stands the test of time and rises to the top, and I'd rather live in a thriving, flourishing world full of all these things, because there's more cream-of-the-crop when there's more everything.

It's evolutionary fitness operating in the space of ideas. I agree that "maybe later" was indeed a useful mechanism, and maybe even a local optimum in the development methodology search space (which recently experienced a major earthquake!), but evolutionary pressure will bring it back into existence in some form sooner or later.

[jaggederest]

One of my favorite things about AI is that I don't have to execute the curation and criticism at the "page of monospaced text" stage to anywhere near the degree, difficulty, or criticality. I love being able to build it, try it, say "No, no I don't think I will do this, this is amazingly awful"

[torben-friis]

Funnily enough, I live for the page. I would love to do my whole job with pen and paper and ignore the computer even.

[jaggederest]

I actually in a lot of ways agree with you, I could probably do my job via paper letters :) but especially for more UI-heavy work which I'm pinch hitting on it's really difficult for me to translate large features from page to reality for that kind of curation.

[apsurd]

I agree but the practical cost is most heavily paid in a collaborative work setting. Now everyone at all layers of a company is doing build prototype exploration but without the intermediary internal-filter check. Instead, these explorations get a straight line to production, for reasons I'm not exactly sure. Because it can I guess?

[hgoel]

That's the part that surprises me. I have only ever shared one prototype I made with AI, and only because we were presenting on how we were exploring AI use and with constant mention that it was a proof of concept prototype.

I feel like putting any prototype, even if it was hand written, would be really risking my credibility if I put it into production without having it at least to the point that it wouldn't matter if it was vibe coded, via a few weeks of using the project myself.

[jaggederest]

Yeah that's where my eyebrows go to the moon. My investigations are at best in staging after a dev machine review, if nontech people are involved you need per-user cloud dev I think

[esailija]

More is not more after a certain point. Even without AI it was already way too cheap to produce software and we built way too many things that should not be built because it wasn't worth the liabilities and other tradeoffs.

Basically software was already like food with obesity being the problem not famine. LLM is like being able to create treats and other garbage with thought, imagine what that would do to obesity. The amount of quality food created would be less than 100 years ago even though you could create infinitely more food in general.

[bartread]

I agree with this take.

My immediate thought on reading the piece was along the lines of, “Yeah, but lots of the people who pick what we should work on aren’t very good at picking the right things to work on, and even the ones who are a bit better at it generally can’t do it consistently.” (And I’m not implying I’m better at it.)

So in that sense, being able to simply build more - perhaps a lot more - of what’s on the backlog gives you a much better chance of implementing some of the ideas that will be winners.

[coldtea]

Historically good stuff "stands the test of time and rises to the top" when it is not drown out by the bad stuff.

Gold nuggets among some scaterred garbage are still findable. But 10x gold nuggets burried in a massive landfill mountain created by automated garbage (slop) producing machines, would be much harder to be found. And people are more likely to give up, than to have to shift through the tons of garbage.

And that's ignoring the foul smell and health conditions arising from having to live next to all this garbage (which, in this analogy, is the social and cultural impact).

Also ignoring how living by garbage influeces your taste and numbs your smell, which ends up creating less good stuff. "Just churn more stuff to get more good art", is like losing in profit but making it up in volume.

>It's evolutionary fitness operating in the space of ideas.

More like a shoo-in nomination for civilizational Darwin Awards.