> here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere

You should’ve started with this. Take a really deep breath, take your phone, find closest park, go slowly there (don’t prompt LLM on the way), find a green patch on the ground (it’s called grass) and touch it.

Contrary to you I've been playing with the AI Howto stuff from TLDP forever from Markov chain based chatbots to genetic algos and neural networks and I know the limits on LLM's and how the rot on retroalimentation by reusing their own data. They can't extrapolate. Period. In every cycle they get dumber by design unless there's new human curated content. Go try to explain that to corporations having their copyrighted code being stolen away, be GPL or propietary.

I find all those arguments unconvincing. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars. The idea that it would be somehow uneconomical for me to take the time to get it right feels like utter nonsense. I don't have to have much of an edge over an LLM to come out on top once you start to distribute the resulting product. Three months of my time costs $25,000 or so (hey, I'm in Europe, adjust as you see fit), if I can make something just a little bit better than AI Albert who can whip something together for a tenth of the price, my time will pay for itself once you have modest amounts of revenue from it.

And I'm fully convinced that what I do will not just be a little bit better than what AI Al makes. It will trounce it in all quality criteria. But of course, coincidentally with the rise of AI assistance, software quality has completely disappeared from the conversation. I wonder why.

You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.