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In software development, good taste translates to readability, succinctness and maintainability of the code. It also translates to intuitiveness, reliability, s

In software development, good taste translates to readability, succinctness and maintainability of the code. It also translates to intuitiveness, reliability, security, performance, scalability and utility of the software. All this doesn't necessarily translate to sales though. Because, to evaluate those things requires attention, trust, time and effort. This is a significant barrier because a lot of software will appear to meet all of these superficially. After 1 day of usage, a piece of software may appear to be intuitive, reliable, secure, performant and useful... But then after some time (sometimes a whole week or longer) you run into a critical scenario and discover that it cannot be solved with that software... Or performance drops off sharply after you created the 1000th record in the software... Or a hacker takes months to find that one endpoint which allows full remote code execution. Even in an optimistic scenario, 1 week is a long time to evaluate a piece of software. I've encountered software which took 6 months and large teams of people to realize that it wasn't suitable. That's how long it took to hit the critical limits. It's a very long evaluation loop. So you cannot judge new software efficiently by just looking at it. Even industry consensus is problematic if the software is very new and complex... Plenty of trends have fallen off a cliff in the past. You need to understand who is behind the software... And even that's not so easy; social proof can be misleading when it comes to deep technical ideas. The people who are good at social networking aren't necessarily good with tech. I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. And the irony of it is that the solutions already exist... What doesn't exist is the mechanism to identify those solutions. But even the mindset needs to be corrected first.

dimgl 2mo ago
> I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. I'm seeing the same thing. Of course, it's always possible that AI capabilities grow significantly from here and this worry is moot (and there will be other things to worry about, like whether I'll have a job). But seriously, after a while AI generated codebases really fall apart. It's a bit of cope from me that this problem won't be solved in the future, but I'm also really disappointed with how many people really do not care about writing high-quality software that is easy to understand, performant, and resilient to bugs. Like, why did you decide to work on software in the first place? I think we're going to see some pretty careless mistakes in the future that will result in a lot of pain...
- socketcluster 2mo ago
  I'm feeling quite confident that AI won't be able to produce quality code in the foreseeable future. Because the bottleneck is not technology, it's people and incentives. Firstly, people don't agree on what good code is (developers who get paid by the hour tend to favor complexity so they think good code is complex code), secondly, AI companies have an incentive to produce more tokens; this works against good architecture since good architecture would cost fewer tokens to maintain. Thirdly, many decision makers tend to conflate complexity with intelligence, hence they are more likely to prefer complex solutions over optimal ones.

dimgl 2mo ago

> I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. I'm seeing the same thing. Of course, it's always possible that AI capabilities grow significantly from here and this worry is moot (and there will be other things to worry about, like whether I'll have a job). But seriously, after a while AI generated codebases really fall apart. It's a bit of cope from me that this problem won't be solved in the future, but I'm also really disappointed with how many people really do not care about writing high-quality software that is easy to understand, performant, and resilient to bugs. Like, why did you decide to work on software in the first place? I think we're going to see some pretty careless mistakes in the future that will result in a lot of pain...

socketcluster 2mo ago
I'm feeling quite confident that AI won't be able to produce quality code in the foreseeable future. Because the bottleneck is not technology, it's people and incentives. Firstly, people don't agree on what good code is (developers who get paid by the hour tend to favor complexity so they think good code is complex code), secondly, AI companies have an incentive to produce more tokens; this works against good architecture since good architecture would cost fewer tokens to maintain. Thirdly, many decision makers tend to conflate complexity with intelligence, hence they are more likely to prefer complex solutions over optimal ones.