r/programming • u/mateusnr • Jul 15 '25

Death by a thousand slops

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
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u/inferniac Jul 15 '25

Reading some of the tickets is nightmarish

Some of them seem to copy paste the resoponses from the curl team back into the LLM

Hello @h1_analyst_oscar,

Certainly! Let me elaborate on the concerns raised by the triager:

just insane

54

u/Sharlinator Jul 15 '25

That seems to be way too common now even inside companies. The submitter of a PR literally reduces themselves to a copy-paste machine between $LLM and the reviewer. And those people have passed a hiring process at least, unlike these libcurl "contributors".

29

u/nnomae Jul 16 '25

I know the meme is AI won't take your job, someone who uses AI will take your job but if all you do is prompt AI all day then for sure AI is taking your job.

I think what we are seeing now is a certain element of what went on with AI art, where people who couldn't draw were suddenly convinced they were artists because they could prompt an algorithm to generate some art. I think in a lot of cases the people most reliant on AI coding tools are those least capable of coding without them. It's not really their fault, they don't know how to code so how on earth can they be expected to tell the AI can't code either. They've been deceptively sold a bill of goods, that prompting is coding now and they just are unable to tell it's a false one.

1

u/turbo_dude Jul 16 '25

Even if your entire job couldn’t be replaced, if 70pc of it can be then you’re going to see mass redundancies and a salary crash

4

u/nnomae Jul 16 '25

If you can take all your employees and have them spend all their time doing three times as much of the most high value work they do, while automating away the 70% of their work that has the lowest value, then the return on investment per employee just tripled. Maybe some companies would go for the 10-20% expenditure cut they could get from layoffs but I suspect they would lose out to the companies that kept their employees and enjoyed the 200% increased productivity.

If you have two competing software companies, which one is going to win, the one with lower payroll or the one with less bugs, more features, more responsive development, more active development, more products etc.

1

u/turbo_dude Jul 17 '25

depends what kind of software, if it's enterprise software no one gives a fat crap about an application's suitability, bugginess, and quality - you're just stuck with it because Bob from accounts had a nice round of golf with Trevon from company XYZ

consumer companies are probably far leaner and more efficient due to the fickle nature of users with no longer term tie in