[nancyminusone]

Outside software, AI is synonymous with low quality and low effort. As in, "I don't care enough about you to bother with you myself, I'll have the AI do it". Covers news articles, emails, customer service, products, art, jobs, etc.

The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

[hannasanarion]

This is a big part of it. When you spent less time making something than you expect consumers to spend watching it, the message it sends is an insult.

Doubly so if the product also has quality problems inherent in AI art, video, music, not only does it communicate "your attention is not worth my time" but also "your attention is not worth putting in effort to keep".

[spwa4]

But it's easy to avoid by paying for stuff, yet people are very unwilling to do that ... so what's the solution?

[leviliebvin]

Within software too.

[donatj]

At AIs absolute best (rarely) it builds software like a very competent 9-5er. It's fine, it works, it's largely inoffensive.

It never does anything interesting or inspired. It never gets halfway into building something and then questions the entire premise of your app. It's automated milquetoast.

[aeve890]

>At AIs absolute best (rarely) it builds software like a very competent 9-5er. It's fine, it works, it's largely inoffensive.

If only middle management and c-suite knew that

[andai]

> It never does anything interesting or inspired.

I asked Sonnet to port an old game I wrote in college to HTML5.

It threw out the audio and graphics system, made it a single HTML file with no dependencies, no assets, everything dynamically generated, added new backgrounds, and new music.

I just asked it for a port, so I was like wtf, though some of the choices it made were better than the original ones.

Would be nice if that "initiative" could be turned on or off on demand though. I haven't tested that. (Some guy told me "if you want creativity, use Claude. To turn the behavior off, use a different model!")

[api]

Much like self-driving cars being better than drunk, incompetent, or texting human drivers, AI software is generally better than the garbage churned out by code monkeys who don't care or cheap lowest bidder outsourcers.

It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code, but that requires a hand-crafting expert human engineer and takes a long time.

I predict that the latter will be reserved for the highest value, longest lived, or special (high performance, high security) parts of systems.

[FeloniousHam]

> It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code

As of June 25th, 2026. Read your comment in four years, and tell me you believe what you've posted.

Maybe one year? Four months?

[api]

This is definitely a dated comment, yes. I believe it is true today and probably will be for a while, but probably not forever.

The spec is the new code. I expect that in 5 years I will rarely write actual code. I will write specs and herd bots.

[pjc50]

Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.

That doesn't give you good taste, but .. for yer basic line of business or enterprise app, expectations were already low, and most websites have user-hostile design written into the requirements, so the damage isn't too bad.

I do think we've yet to see what the worst case for government contractor software project + vibe coding is. The benchmark is the Canadian gun registry https://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=1949 "In what may be the worst budget overrun in history, the costs to implement a registry of firearms balloons from $2M to $860M". Now add token spend to that.

[steveBK123]

> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.

A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic.

For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely incorrect numerical but with confidence and 3-decimal place precision.

So the chatbot makes it "easier" to ask things, because you don't need to know which tab in the UI to use / or code to write in their scripting interface / or function to call in their Excel interface / or parameters to pass to get the correct answer.

Unfortunately the chatbot also may completely mistranslate your question, call the wrong function/pass wrong parameters and feed you back nonsense confidently.

Who is this helping?

[pjc50]

Yeah, this is not a good use of AI and the customer service people are going to gradually work that out, especially once people start having the "you know this is a legally binding statement on behalf of your company, right" discussion.

You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.

[steveBK123]

> You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.

The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism? Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ?

Arguably the majority of companies & corporate users are using these tools in cases they expect determinism. Email inbox summaries. Search summaries. What is the value of x queries. You'd be shocked.

My favorite Google AI summary bug/quirk that seems to persist (I just tested it again) - "are Lillies OK for cats". The summary starts with "Yes, lilies are extremely toxic to cats. "

I first hit this with another plant (lavender) where the response was much longer and on an iPhone looked like this:

Yes, lavender (both the plant and its essential oils) [line break]

is considered toxic to cats.

[ben_w]

> The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism? Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ?

That's not the relevant question, because the actual answer to what you asked is "all flows where human judgement is used".

The thing we need to not blindly use current generation AI for is "things where we accept the combination of an untrained (or barely trained) human with no QA".

IMO, the drive to use AI is not only fully automating a lot of things that shouldn't be so, but also revealing how some of them never should have been in the first place. If your human customer support agent makes stuff up and that got your business a penalty fine, you might discipline or fire them; not so easy when it's an AI that replaced a whole call centre in one go, even when the incident frequency is the same.

[thedevilslawyer]

Interesting thought. So maybe this answers the question of whether coding is art or science.

[steveBK123]

Well it remains both I think.

The science part is that the outcomes are scientifically verifiable, hence tests.

The art part is that unlike the physical world with the laws of physics, there are nearly limitless ways in code to accomplish those outcomes.

[danlugo92]

We must be using different AI.

Ever since Claude Opus 4.7 it's been helping me greatly ship around 3x to 5x faster, and it's good code if I tell it to follow my existing code's structures. Otherwise you have to create .md guideline files and it works.

It's not perfect, but again, 3x to 5x (!!!)

[jerkstate]

It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t. Let them churn their own butter, weave their own clothes, and type out their programs one character at a time. It’s what they want.

[jplusequalt]

>It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t.

This reeks of self flattery. Using AI isn't "hard". Any experienced developer can simply pull in a skill into your harness and have it writing code at a similar level to others with the same harness.

[jerkstate]

if you think it sucks and people like Linus Torvalds, Andrej Karpathy, and Martin Fowler are saying it can be used well, it’s probably a skill issue.

[archagon]

Have fun! Look forward to seeing the results of your insane gains.

[aeve890]

> ship around 3x to 5x faster

Web apps and CRUDs, if may I ask? Or is AI helping you with something that you couldn't ever do by yourself? I have mixed results across different technologies like frontend, backend, infra and hardware.

[blourvim]

I am a backend dev, and building a mobile app for the first time, It is a toy sized project right now and it works, would have indeed taken me 5x the time to get to that point on my own.

I know from experience that to make it a non-toy project I am probably going to need to spend some, if not most of that saved time cleaning up in the future due to technical debt.

For backend, it is mildly useful at best, helpful with boilerplate and when I know exactly what needs to be built. I have not yet firsthand experienced these 10x, 100x productivity gains.

Frontend, forms,tables and generic dashboards is pretty good, I am sure one could get it done faster and better over the long term with proper technique and methods, but I just hate css

[pjc50]

AI is an extremely powerful weapon against a blank page.

It's much easier to take "well now I have an app, which after using for a bit I find it sucks in <quantifiable list of ways>" and then fix them, than it is to start from absolutely nothing.

[blourvim]

Thats a big sometimes for me. I am unfamiliar with the app development process. For backend,I would rather design the whole thing from scratch rather than try to fix a broken architecture. For frontend, maybe that is true, but I haven't had the chance to build anything complex, just forms and tables.

[queenkjuul]

Honestly it sucks at Web apps of any meaningful complexity too. On my huge complex app at work, nothing can coax it to do an even average quality job in one pass. It hates following my project conventions even after spelling it out in MDs

[treespace8]

Even then when using AI just for myself I limit it to building tools, looking for errors. But when it comes to full blown generation, I just don't like what it makes.

[arw0n]

I would argue a different case: When AI is noticeable, it is obvious the person doesn't care enough to bother with you.

I'm a heavy user of AI, but it has not changed the amount of time I invest in certain things, rather, I think it has unequivocally raised its quality. In some cases it has also raised the ceiling at how good I can do things, so I'm investing more time, effort and creativity now.

For example: I'm currently working on a workshop on AI security. This is obviously time boxed by all my other obligations, and I can spend maybe 60 hours to prepare it, hopefully in a quality that my captive listeners don't have to suffer.

The newest models provide me with at least 3 major benefits:

- I have merciless feedback and criticism always available. A lot of it I might disagree with, but I'm quick to dismiss. Same with ideas. If 9/10 ideas are bad, but I'm able to dismiss them quickly, I got one good idea quicker than I can take a shower.

- I can research much more broadly by querying LLMs than just consulting Google et al. A lot of interesting minor breaches, blog posts, or forum discussions I would have missed without letting Claude and Gemini run deep research sessions.

- I can quickly generate fictional scenarios and examples. In that workshop I would like to go through some scenarios on risks of using AI Coding Agents. Creating those scenarios in the past would have cost me days, and now it is a matter of an hour or two.

My coding, writing and general life-planning has equally benefited from LLMs. I've successfully planned a vacation with Claude while on the flight to that vacation, and I've not had to fix a major bug in my software in 3 months. I'm not moving a lot faster, but I'm moving a lot more deliberately.

[marcosdumay]

> The actual quality of the AI output is irrelevant.

The actual quality of the AI output is what created that reputation.