Except one shoe is made by children in a fire-trap sweatshop with no breaks, and the other was made by a well paid adult in good working conditions.
The ends don’t justify the means. The process of making impacts the output in ways that are subtle and important, but even holding the output as a fixed thing - the process of making still matters, at least to the people making it.
And guess how much shoe companies make who manufacture shoes in sweatshop conditions versus the ones who make artisanal handcrafted shoes?
Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns.
Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a more attentive audit by human eyeballs.
Btw in my metaphor, we - the programmers - are the kids in the sweatshop.
Being shoes, offshoring, Webwidgets or AI generated code.
But we’re the shoemakers, not the consumers. It’s actually our job to preserve our own and our peers quality of life.
Cheapest good option possible doesn’t have to be the sweatshop - tho the shareholders of nike or zara would have you believe that - the labor movements of the 19th century proved that’s not the case.
