[carlgreene]

Of course there were. Don't be pedantic. Anybody could write a program and put it on the internet. But to get a reasonably polished version with decent features and an enjoyable enough UX for someone to sign up and even pay money more, it generally took people who kind of knew what they were doing.

Of course shortcuts were taken. They always were and always will be. But don't try to compare shipping software today to even just 3 years ago.

[kimixa]

Yes - AI has completely destroyed the set of "Signals" people used to judge quality of much software. They weren't ever 100% accurate, sure, but they were often pretty good heuristics for "level of care", what the devs considered important (or didn't consider important) and similar.

And I mean that as both "end user" software signals, and "library" signals for other devs.

I assume that set of signals will slowly be updated. If one of those ends up being "Any Use of AI At All" is still an open question, depending on if the promised hype actually ends up meeting capability as much as anything.

[Flashtoo]

This is true beyond software. It used to be that the proof of the thinking process was in the resulting artifact. No longer can you estimate from the existence of a piece of text and the level of polish behind it that the apparent author has put at least a reasonable amount of thought into it. This applies to comments, blogs, emails, and most troublingly I've seen this happen at my job with things like requirement specs. Now, the veneer of quality makes it much harder to know what is the appropriate amount of skepticism to judge the contents with. And it's too tiring to be maximally skeptical about everything.