Fair that motivated reasoning could be at play. Rob's audience is SaaS founders, but whether his listeners remain engaged and his sales funnel full does not influence how genai affects their businesses, and being duplicitous doesn't fit with his character.
Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be.
Since 2002 Richard Stallman has spoken again using term "content" this way.
> using the word as a noun to describe works and communications through which people have expressed themselves adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages all the works by subordinating them to the box that is full.
That's an interesting argument. In construction, the larger a project, the more justifiable it is to invest in quality. Is it different than software? I think a better argument against licensure is that it makes small projects too expensive, but I disagree. It shifts not the overall cost, but when cost is paid: "The upfront cost will increase, but a long tail of costs stemming from quality issues will decrease."
I worked for 10 years in medical devices. QMS was business as usual. I think large software projects with millions budgeted should have them. But the difference between a QMS and licensure is a person's signature and their personal commitment to a statement of ethics as well as their accountability and ability to appeal to a professional organization.
I'm glad you mentioned downward market pressure on quality. I agree that is an issue. That's why I advocate for licensure of software engineering professionals, which exerts a counteracting force back up.
It's kind of like the saying "the right note played at the wrong time is wrong." An implementation that works today but could break in the future is wrong. I'm not willing to treat an LLM as an oracle that knows the difference. It certainly hasn't earned that trust.
> It was reasonable to be skeptical the first time
It's still reasonable to be skeptical. A few weeks ago a post was discussed here on HN [1] that asked:
> What would have to be true for us to ‘check English into the repository’ instead of code?
to which I replied:
> Code is already the cheapest path to working, correct software. LLMs do not change the calculus because figuring out what to make is the expensive part, not coding it up. Skipping code makes the specification of what to make even more expensive and throws away the tools that keep precision affordable. Programming in English would be more expensive than just using a programming language. [2]
The job when picking up a codebase made by human or machine always involves reverse-engineering the design intent from code. That's especially hard for LLM-generated code because the path to runtime was so rushed.
> It's more expensive to fix code at runtime than at compile time and at compile time than at design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.
I'm Doug, quoted above. I took Jimmy's excellent course, and when I learned about Command Center, I subbed immediately. I wasn't disappointed. It's a bit like turning your LLM into a graduate of that course.
Thanks for reading. The question the article addresses is, "What would have to be true to check in English to the repo' and the answer is grounded in how business works: it seeks to minimize costs. Maintenance of code rather than very detailed English happens to be cheaper.
> When programming in C, to avoid unexpected pitfalls, one must be acutely aware of a whole slew of implicit behaviors (some of which are implementation-defined or even undefined).