The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.
I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.
I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.
Planes falling out of the sky, trains crashing into each other, pacemakers downloading updates and freezing
Then regulators will take things seriously.
I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.
I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.
There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?
Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.
Something is lost along the way.
You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.
Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
Sounds like job prospects to me.
Like Slack or GitHub or AWS or whatever. It’s almost always a net positive to wait vs do it yourself.
What could possibly go wrong.
However, the temptation of productivity gains are strong, and few of the customers look into relaxing these rules.
Probably "don't do anything to upset AI companies or you will effectively become a handicapped person"
Not that different from life in China: "don't do anything to upset Tencent and AliPay or you will become an outcast"
Or life in the US if you're a content creator: "don't do anything to upset Meta or Youtube or you will not be able to pay your rent"
The future: ToS basically becomes law, and you will be stripped of your own second brain if you violate it or say anything they deem "sensitive"
When the electricity goes out, (most) people get similarly upset. No electricity means no internet, and all of a sudden everything that people had planed to do can’t be done until the power returns.
I can't wait for a Hollywood blockbuster that'll pretty much be science non-fiction.
Yesterday one asked another "how much of this deck did Claude do"? and the response was "50%". "What 50% did you do?" => "I chose the font and colors".
* ransomware attack, fire in the server room, database HDD crash, car accident takes out the internet connection, ...
