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Agreed. People talk like all the code written before AI was great, or like everyone was building valuable software. Most of it wasn’t. Anyone who has touched programming even a little knows syntax is torture, and even testing a tiny idea used to eat a lot of time and effort. Yet most people were googling their way through it anyway. People forget the “google how to center a div” jokes.
Who wrote the code doesn’t matter much. Software engineering is a measurable field, and a product has value for what it is, not for who made it. If you’re smart enough, lean toward engineering and know a bit about how software works, not using an LLM is a real waste of time.
You just have to know what you’re doing. That’s the real point, and it’s not that hard to learn. Most people who can’t build anything of real value, or who ship security problems, fail right here.
Even if the code came from divine revelation rather than an LLM; quality, security, performance, and a well-thought-out underlying architecture are what truly matter.
As Linus Torvalds said:
“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
We went from humans copying human code to machines copying human code. That's about it. 90% of coding would be eliminated if companies weren't fucking retarded IP (Intellectual Property not Internet Protocol) maxxers.
Yes, that’s exactly how it was, lol. When I was just trying things out with HTML and CSS, I’d open sites with good design, hit inspect, copy the parts I liked, fix them up and paste them into my own file. I’d take the layout of the homepage cards from the New York Times and a navbar from some other site.
A year ago, yes. Today, human coders are just as likely (maybe more likely?) to write bad code compared to machine written code.
Look at all the exploits and vulnerabilities being discovered around us. All human code. Bugs that went undetected for years and in some cases, decades, was written by humans. AI slop is the product of inefficient human action/direction. AI just follows directions.
The perfect analogy is the game in which one must give exact instructions on how to do a simple task, like making a peanut butter sandwich original ↗. Your results are only as good as your instructions.
The optimal scenario today is machine written code planned/orchestrated by humans with several machine review passes and a final human reviewer.