[al_borland]

AI is no good, but neither are people, isn’t a great sales pitch.

I think for small tools that people want to make for themselves, that’s great. Where I see a problems are when other people and money get involved. If something goes wrong, who is accountable? Claude wrote it, Claude reviewed it, Claude submitted the PR… yet Claude can’t have any real accountability.

[appplication]

I think small tools people make for themselves is realistically less than 1% of software produced. Most of the code, and - to the GP’s point - bad code, is produced in corporations with plenty of money and budget.

There is just such a tremendous amount of waste at every company, in that the headcount and software expands to fill the budget. I’m not defending Elon, but look at how much he slashed from X (80% or so?) and the company still has its core product functioning and an active user base.

There is a ton of software (especially internal) at essentially every company that also is low accountability before Claude. “Oh Ted built that but he’s working on a new important project. I understand it’s broken and that’s impacting you but we won’t be able to prioritize this until next quarter at least. Can you set up a meeting next month to discuss?”

Honestly the outcome for all of these LLMs is indeed is likely a higher amount of software with no accountability, but it’s also an improved ability to juggle more of that software to the same (realistically low) standard.

[LaundroMat]

"A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision"

-- Internal IBM training manual, 1979

[Maxatar]

It's an absolutely phenomenal sales pitch to executives. A ton of automation is sold on the basis that it's probably not going to be as good as having a dedicated person do it, but that automation leads to much lower maintenance scales better, is more deterministic and reproducible.