Posted by amitprasad 5 hours ago
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
But now, reading, understanding, and maintaining the software is the job of coding agents. You are free to do the interesting work: setting goals and directions for the agents, evaluating the finished product, communicating with stakeholders, etc. This has always been the hard and interesting part of systems design: solving real-world problems for people and businesses.
If the function is a black box, but you’re sure the inputs produces a certain output without side effects and is fast, do you NEED “good code” inside?
After about 10yrs of coding, the next 10 of coding is pretty brainless. Better to try and solve people/tech interaction problems than plumbing up yet-another-social/mobile/gaming/crypto thing.
AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid paying a person to do the job
Non determinism and inaccuracy are also very real features of human programmers.
There are thousand of examples where tech became obsolute and frankly it’s given. No coders opinion will change it, but everybody is free to do what ever hobby the want. Author does seem to accept it, but commentor above not.
As civilizations declined, pride in one's work, would have been more or less as described in this comment.
But that's soviet bureucracy and Potempkin villages with extra steps.