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I think my disagreement with software developers who want to use LLMs to generate a lot of code is that I don’t think we need more software faster. I have no proof of that, but I suspect we now have digitized and built software for almost everything useful, and sometimes for harmful stuff as well.

Software has eaten the world. Communication, entertainment, education, productivity, research, etc. The market is totally addressed. We actually need to slow down and write less code, fix old code, make things more accessible and performant, more secure, more usable, etc.

The correct frontier is quality, not quantity or time-to-market. But that‘s a low-growth or even economically stagnant prospect, so your employers and investors don’t want that, and you can’t sell them on it and get a promotion or even a job.

There could be an argument that one could AI-harness their way into producing better software, but let’s be real, that’s not what your OKRs say.

Software developers think they’re explorers colonizing space, when the actual need, by now, is for them to be plumbers maintaining an essential down-to-earth infrastructure of an almost fixed size.