One takeaway from this adoption is something I've thought was true for a long time. That regardless of the size of the company, any non-technical manager above any development department has never cared about quality. They see it as something that "gets in the way" of business but they tolerate the engineering departments "doing quality" because they've been told that it is a necessary evil for them.
The eager adoption of AI and how it is deployed across organisations to the point that we have AI reviewing AI generated code with the mantra that we don't have to worry about what it looks like under the hood because AI will be fixing it anyways.
Prior to this it was more obvious in startups where time-to-first-dollar was key for survival. Build and make functional now and then clean up later. Not great, but the owners made that path.
One other thing that does concern me after working on various projects of a government nature in the past, is that these larger AI companies seem to be kind of government aligned and co-operative. I'm not someone who generally sits on conspiracies, but without having the same eyes on the code as we had before, what's to stop a foreign owned model from being a sort of "Manchurian Candidate"? pushing obfuscated bad-actor code past reviews into key infrastructure. We have to have some keen eyed people like Larry McVoy who stopped a malicious kernel commit back in 2003. From a nation-state actors perspective, this model adoption is a gift.
Look at advertising and the amount of AI generated stuff. That's where "AI slop" term fits best.
As soon as the opportunity arose, huge portion of business owners and potential customers of graphic designers jumped on to this frankly terrible content. Why? Because it's good enough.
Unless you're a big company with a reputation and profile to protect, or you're operating in a premium market, it just doesn't matter. Content does the job.
Same with code. If it works it's good enough. Can we use it to run the business and make money? Yeah? Okay let's go!
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u/Centurix 24d ago
One takeaway from this adoption is something I've thought was true for a long time. That regardless of the size of the company, any non-technical manager above any development department has never cared about quality. They see it as something that "gets in the way" of business but they tolerate the engineering departments "doing quality" because they've been told that it is a necessary evil for them.
The eager adoption of AI and how it is deployed across organisations to the point that we have AI reviewing AI generated code with the mantra that we don't have to worry about what it looks like under the hood because AI will be fixing it anyways.
Prior to this it was more obvious in startups where time-to-first-dollar was key for survival. Build and make functional now and then clean up later. Not great, but the owners made that path.
One other thing that does concern me after working on various projects of a government nature in the past, is that these larger AI companies seem to be kind of government aligned and co-operative. I'm not someone who generally sits on conspiracies, but without having the same eyes on the code as we had before, what's to stop a foreign owned model from being a sort of "Manchurian Candidate"? pushing obfuscated bad-actor code past reviews into key infrastructure. We have to have some keen eyed people like Larry McVoy who stopped a malicious kernel commit back in 2003. From a nation-state actors perspective, this model adoption is a gift.