[the_af]

> Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted. We have error budgets for a reason, and AI is just shifting how we allocate them. It's only in certain roles where small mistakes can end your company - think hedge funds, aerospace, etc. - where there's safety in the non-determinism argument.

That's a bit shortsighted. There have been cries of software becoming needlessly bloated and inefficient since computers have existed (Wirth, of course, but countless others too). Do you visit any gamer communities? They are constantly blaming careless waste of resources and lack of optimization in games for many AAA games performing badly in even state of the art hardware, or constantly requiring you to upgrade your gaming rig.

I don't think the only scenario is boring CRUD or line of business software, where indeed performance often doesn't matter, and most of it can now be written by an AI.

[sarchertech]

Even in CRUD line of business software, lack of performance causes enormous problems that the current software development culture glosses over.

Just one example I've seen time and again. You take an application that if optimized could run on a single server (maybe 2 if you absolutely have to have zero downtime deployments), but because no one cares about performance it runs on 10 or more. You now have a complexity avalanche that rapidly blows up. Then you need more hierarchy to handle the additional organizational complexity etc...

Then people start breaking out pieces of the app so they can scale them separately and before long you're looking at 200 engineers to do a job that certainly doesn't need that many people.

I realize I'm ignoring a whole lot of other issues that result in this kind of complexity, but lack of performance contributes to this a lot more than people want to admit.

[the_af]

Agreed. I wanted to give some credence to the fact many cookie-cutter CRUD apps can absorb a ton of inefficiencies until they truly burst at the seams, but yeah, even in that case software bloat and bad use of resources matters.

I find it intriguing seeing this new batch of dev-types completely giving up on the matter. The conversation of machine vs developer efficiency is not new, but completely giving up on any sane use of resources is something relatively new, I think. Especially coming from some in the HN crowd. Maybe these are new people, so I can chalk it up to generational turnover?