Comment by leecommamichael

The issue is that code isn't clothing. It's the clothing factory. We aren't artisans sewing clothing. We're production engineers deciding on layouts for robots to make clothes most efficiently.

I see this type error of thinking all the time. Engineers don't make objects of type A, we make functions of type A -> B or higher order.

> industry machinery could match the average artisan or even beat the average

Whether it could is distinct from whether it will. I'm sure you've noticed the decline in the quality of clothing. Markets a mercurial and subject to manipulation through hype (fast fashion is just a marketing scheme to generate revenue, but people bought into the lie).

With code, you have a complicating factor, namely, that LLMs are now consuming their own shit. As LLM use increases, the percentage of code that is generated vs. written by people will increase. That risks creating an echo chamber of sorts.

> This is the "artisanal clothing argument".

> it is easier to 'discipline' the top 5 AI agents in the planet - rather than try to get a million distributed devs ("artisans") to produce high quality results.

Your take essentially is "let's live in a shoe box, packaging pipelines produce them cheaply en masse, who needs slow poke construction engineers and architects anymore"

Except I am not talking about clothing. You are guessing when you say "I'd think" based on your comparison to manufacturing clothing. Why guess and compare when you have more context than that? You're in this industry, right? The commodity of clothing is not like the commodity of software at all. Almost nothing is, as it doesn't really have a physical form. That impacts the economics significantly.

To highlight the gaps in your analogy; machinery still fails to match artisan clothing-makers. Despite being relatively fit, I've got wide hips. I cannot buy denim jeans that both; fit my legs, _and_ my waist. I either roll the legs up or have them hemmed. I am not all that odd, either. One size cannot fit all.

Artisanal clothing is functionally equivalent to mass-produced clothing, but more expensive.

Much of contemporary software is functionally equivalent but more expensive to run and produce than previous generations. Chat, project management, document editing, online stores… all seem to have gotten more expensive to produce and run with little to no gain in functionality.

Complexity in software production and tooling keeps increasing yet functionally software is more or less the same as 20 years ago (obv. excluding advancements depending on hardware like video, 3D rendering, LLMs, etc.

> Elegantly, agents finally give us an objective measure of what "good" code is. It's code that maximizes the likelihood that future agents will be able to successfully solve problems in this codebase. If code is "bad" it makes future problems harder.

An analogous argument was made in the 90's to advocate for the rising desire for IDEs and OOP languages. "Bad" code came to be seen as 1000+ lines in one file because you could simply conjure up the documentation out-of-context, and so separation of concerns slipped all the way from "one function one purpose" to something not far from "one function one file."

I don't say this as pure refusal, but to beg the question of what we lose when we make these values-changes. At this time, we do not know. We are meekly accepting a new mental prosthesis with insufficient foresight of the consequences.