> your responsibility is to produce working code that you are confident in
I highly agree with this but can we recognize that even before AI coding that this (low standard) is not being met? We've created a culture where we encourage cutting corners and rushing things. We pretend there is this divide between "people who love to code" and "people who see coding as a means to an end." We pretend that "end" is "a product" and not "money". The ones who "love to code" are using code as a means to make things. Beautiful code isn't about its aesthetics, it is about elegant solutions that solve problems. Love to code is about taking pride in the things you build.
We forgot that there was something magic about coding. We can make a lot of money and make the world a better place. But we got too obsessed with the money that we let it get in the way of the latter. We've become rent seeking, we've become myopic. Look at Apple. They benefit from developers make apps even without taking a 30% cut. They would still come out ahead if they paid developers! The apps are the whole fucking reason we have smartphones, the whole reason we have computers in the first place. I call this myopic because both parties would benefit in the long run, getting higher rewards than had we not worked together. It was the open system that made this world, and in response we decided to put up walls.
You're right, it really doesn't matter who or what writes the code. At the end of the day it is the code that matters. But I think we would be naive to dismiss the prevalence of "AI Slop". Certainly AI can help us, but are we going to use it to make better code or are we going to use it to write shit code faster? Honestly, all the pushback seems to just be the result of going too far.
I'm not sure that commercially-motivated, mass-produced code takes away from "artisan" code. The former is off putting for the artisans among us, but if you were to sort the engineers at a well functioning software company by how good they are/how well they're compensated, you'd have approximately produced a list of who loves the craft they most.
I'm not talking about "artisan code". I'm talking about having pride in your work. I'm talking about being an engineer. You don't have to love your craft to make things have some quality. It helps, but it isn't necessary.
But I disagree. I don't think you see these strong correlations between compensation and competency. We use dumb metrics like leet code, jira tickets filled, and lines of code written. It's hard to measure how many jira tickets someone's code results in. It's hard to determine if it is because they wrote shit code or because they wrote a feature that is now getting a lot of attention. But we often know the answer intuitively.
There's so much low hanging fruit out there. We were dissing YouTube yesterday right?
Why is my home page 2 videos taking up 70% of the row, then 5 shorts, 2 videos taking 60% of the row, 5 shorts, and then 3 videos taking the whole row? All those videos are aligned! Then I refresh the page and it is 2 rows of 3.
I search a video and I get 3 somewhat related videos and then just a list of unrelated stuff. WHY?!
Why is it that when you have captions on that these will display directly on top of captions (or other text) that are embedded into the video? You tell me you can autogenerate captions but can't auto-detect them? This is super clear if you watch any shorts.
Speaking of shorts do we have to display comments on top of the video? Why are we filling so much of the screen real estate with stuff that people don't care about and cover the actual content? If you're going to do that at least shrink the video or add an alpha channel.
I'm not convinced because I see so much shit. Maybe you're right and that the "artisans" are paid more, but putting a diamond in a landfill doesn't make it any less of a dump. I certainly think "the masses" get in the way of "the artisans".
The job of an engineer is to be a little grumpy. The job of an engineer is to identify problems and to fix them. The "grumpyness" is just direction and motivation.
Edit:
It may be worth disclosing that you're the CEO of an AI code review bot. It doesn't invalidate your comment but you certainly have a horse in the race. A horse that benefits from low quality code becoming more prolific.
We forgot that there was something magic about coding. We can make a lot of money and make the world a better place. But we got too obsessed with the money that we let it get in the way of the latter. We've become rent seeking, we've become myopic. Look at Apple. They benefit from developers make apps even without taking a 30% cut. They would still come out ahead if they paid developers! The apps are the whole fucking reason we have smartphones, the whole reason we have computers in the first place. I call this myopic because both parties would benefit in the long run, getting higher rewards than had we not worked together. It was the open system that made this world, and in response we decided to put up walls.
You're right, it really doesn't matter who or what writes the code. At the end of the day it is the code that matters. But I think we would be naive to dismiss the prevalence of "AI Slop". Certainly AI can help us, but are we going to use it to make better code or are we going to use it to write shit code faster? Honestly, all the pushback seems to just be the result of going too far.