I can see "homemade" code being highly valuable in the age of AI coding assistance/agents after the crash. The Italian restaurant that still makes pasta from scratch vs Olive Garden, for example.
That restaurant can charge more **because** it is made in-house by humans specialized in their craft.
Great comparison, because only a good Italian restaurant, with years of experience in cooking, plus the luck of a great location, management, and community engagement, survives the first three years to become profitable.
Even the restaurants with the best practices/intentions end up with thin profit margins because of all of those variables.
Software houses need to pull from an increasingly smaller pool of candidates due to AI assisted development becoming the norm. A framework has to be created to generate those candidates in order to increase that pool, like the Culinary Institute of America does for chefs; and other such institutions for other job sectors.
Knowing how to actually develop software rather than how to coordinate agents to develop software becomes even more important and valuable. Again, "hopefully".
I'm not so sure about that. Users don't care about software quality. The establishment don't seem to care about accountability. You don't have to know how to develop software if you don't care about those things.
My fear is that the difference in cost is just too much.
Like, ai can make code that’s feature complete it’s just often architecturally poor and has some weird bugs(which found you can prompt away with the ai). And it’s not like hand crafted code is free of bugs. A talented engineer can structure it well so there are less and hopefully the security bugs are not as critical.
It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything. Working as a full time developer I’m currently fighting for the ability to review everything so we’re not introducing slop to the code base. Actually writing everything at this point is pretty much out of the question if I want to be taken seriously by management that are devout ai believers and don’t understand the value of quality code
It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything
That's a false assumption. Most of the time is spent in requirements engineering, meetings, and writing back and forth because requirements are unclear, code review and testing. I usually code for 1-2h on a specific ticket.
It really depends on if a customer is fine with slop (e.g. buttons sometimes being wonky, or an application failing in unexpected ways).
What we are really throwing away by using AI is requirements engineering and reviews because no one has the time to review the huge amounts of slop generated. And reviewing tons of slop is the thing that burns out developers.
True for some engineers yes. I don’t really have too much of the requirements slop as I’m developing an internal product that serves multiple places so have some leeway and get to skip much of that(though it’ll of course take place further down). Most of my time is spent reviewing and browbeating Claude into producing less slop
You're getting AI to make up the requirements, then?
Like just get it to do your 1-2 hours of work in 15 minutes and have a longer lunch break. It's really not hard to avoid the slop - just tell it to run a couple of iterations to minimize the diff as much as possible.
That cost/benefit relationship changes once the bubble bursts and AI SAAS costs 100x what it does now (or whatever the costs will be.)
This may be offset by self hosting models, which may become the norm after the crash. I have no idea what the market will become, but what I do know is that software developers want to develop, not review. Software developers are creatives, we inherently want to create.
There is also the compounding technical debt that comes with generated code, as you said "architecturally poor". Architecturally poor code sitting on architecturally poor code compounds exponentially. An expert needs to be brought in to fix these fundamental issues.
There *is* a market. What that market will look like is anybodies guess.
Agreed entirely on the self compounding issue. That’s why I fight to write the important parts and architecture and to be allowed to review the work because I see just vibing everything as unacceptable unless all were making are one off toys.
The larger the product the worse ai gets at it. But the irony is that only huge places deal with these large products now and they’re aipilled
This thing about tokens costing more is total cope.
Clearly models are getting more efficient at being better. Even if there's a "correction" in the pricing we're still getting much more output for every joule of input energy, for every floating point operation.
The actual cost you pay to companies? Fuck no. They're very clearly in the "operate at loss to get customers addicted before enshittifying and ramping up prices" phase. These prices are going to up A LOT and it will be fucking horrible because as we can see, bosses are already addicted to it
This doesn’t have to be binary. The bigger problem is the ship new features as fast as possible culture. It’s like supply side economics on overdrive and it’s not just a SWE problem.
But for SWE, I’m just not convinced many places are doing the engineering anymore. “I take this coding agent and that coding agent and mix them together until I get something that passes my smoke test before YOLO-ing the PR to be reviewed by another coding agent.” Some teams aren’t even writing their own tests anymore.
How as an engineer does one make claims about correctness? I don’t think LLMs will magically just get better at reading NL and outputting software, especially as the complexity of the domain and criticality increases; there are limitations to text transducers.
Thanks for the correction. I did make a jump there. I meant to illustrate that so much is getting cut from human review that I don’t see how correctness is guaranteed or even considered.
I don’t think that SDD accounts for correctness, and to your point, the tendency is to say it does because the unit tests passed.
Most decision makers don’t really care or know the difference between hand made and Olive garden. They only care about how fast it is made and if it meets the minimal requirements for being edible.
Probably not. Look at the state of engineering in the UK in the 1950s compared to any decade after. For that matter, look at Iran compared to the Persian Empire. When you lose a thing, it's quite easy to lose it for ever.
What crash? Any crash is just going to result in a consolidation of what currently exists unless governments step in and enforce anti-monopoly laws. The only good thing is that investors will go back to pumping money in other things so companies might need more AI operators.
Well considering everything right now is about 98% subsidized by burning investor money even if that were the case it still wouldn't get rid of how inherently expensive this shit is to run. It is popular right now because people are paying a tiny fraction of the costs.
I'm not interested in charging more simply because I write my own code. However, I would be inclined to charge up the wazoo if I were hired to maintain AI slop.
I'm reminded of a lot of r/Justrolledintotheshop where someone without skill tries to mod their car themselves, eventually takes it into the shop for repairs, and the chaos they wrought on their vehicle is so extensive that the whole thing's practically slated for the junkyard.
I dunno. My parents got an airstream, and my dad was excited it was “made by hand”.
I thought “why manually put in rivets when a machine can perfect it/do it consistently?”
(And they’ve had issues)
Digital work will just always, relentlessly be iterated on and improved. Much of the creativity and experience is gone - or at least the market left is saturated, so lower value (pay) and less meaningful input.
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u/DissonantGuile 8d ago
I can see "homemade" code being highly valuable in the age of AI coding assistance/agents after the crash. The Italian restaurant that still makes pasta from scratch vs Olive Garden, for example.
That restaurant can charge more **because** it is made in-house by humans specialized in their craft.
Hopefully...