[basilgohar]

I feel like one of the things that's not said enough, and which I think is conflating the effectiveness of AI in the eyes of actual software engineers, is that, for the most part, most code produced IS lousy. The craft of programming has been watered down so much in favor of results, and so much code is disposable or write-and-use once, that quality just became less relevant.

I remember when I first started out programming 20 years ago, there was time to craft good quality code. Then there were more and more pushes to get more code out faster, and no one really cared about the quality. Bugs became part of the cost of doing business. I think GenAI for code fits well in the more recent paradigm, and comparing it with hand-crafted code of yore is a bit disingenuous, as appealing as it may be, because most code hasn't been that good for a long time.

I am sad to admit it, but AI is just fitting in where poor coding practices have already existed, and flourishing in that local maxima.

[pjmlp]

Indeed this is offshoring taken to the next level.

Business doesn't care about the craft, they care that the use case is solved, even if the code is crap under the hood.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I will say that offshoring has developed a bad name; maybe not unreasonably. There’s some terrible outsourcing shops.

But there’s also a few that are really good. I know people that used Romanian and Polish shops that did great work. They weren’t super-cheap, but still cheaper than American contract developers.

I assume that the bad offshoring orgs are pretty nervous about AI. I also assume that the better ones are learning to incorporate AI as a force multiplier.

Interesting times, ahead…

[sodapopcan]

As someone who resists agents, I agree with all of this 100%, especially that it's not said enough, because this is exactly what I've railed against most of my career. There is a HUGE "LOL all code sucks" sentiment across the majority of our industry and I friggin' hate it.