I think the problem with “AI” code is that many people have almost a religions belief. There’re weirdos on internet who say that AGI is couple years away. And by extension current AI models are seen as something incapable of making a mistake when writing code.
So I hope you're right, but the evidence is currently that you're wrong. Let's see how it plays out, I suppose.
- That said, surely traffic will decline for Q&A sites. "How do I connect tab A into slot B" is something that people are likely to query LLMs for; the response will surely sound authoritative, and could be even correct. That's definitely a task where LLMs could help: common questions that have been asked many times (and as such, are likely to be well-answered in the human-made training data). A 20001st question of "how do I right-align a paragraph in HTML" has not been posted? Good. Rote tasks are well-suited to automation. (Which, again, brings us back to the issue "how to distinguish the response quality?")
Now imagine that HTMZ comes along and people just go straight to asking how to full justify text in HTMZ for their smart bucket. What happens? I doubt we’ll get good answers.
It feels like the test of whether LLMs can stay useful is actually whether we can stop them from hallucinating API endpoints. If we could feed the rules of a language or API into the LLM and have it actually reason from that to code, then my posed problem would be solved. But I don’t think that’s how they fundamentally work.
So, I think the answer is that since all useful data is already in a LLM somewhere all new data will be stolen/scraped and inserted in real time. So if real people are answering the question it will work as normal. The real question is what happens when people are trying to mine karma by answering questions using an LLM that is hallucinating. We have seen such with the Bug Bounty silliness going on.
The problem, of course, is that this might work once in a while for low hanging fruit, until the web inherited things like DICOM and we now have medical imaging in the web browser (I've heard in Apple Vision Pro), where robotics implies the price of unforeseen bugs is not accidental death or dismemberment of one patient, but potentially many.
His clients were usually older small business owners that just wanted a web presence. His rate was $5000/site.
Within a few years, business dried up and he had to do something completely different.
He also hosted his own smtp server for clients.It was an old server on his cable modem in a dusty garage. I helped him prevent spoofing/relaying a few times, but he kept tinkering with the settings and it would happen all over again.
Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.
That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.
> but his customer / employer bought low quality code with lots of tech debt.
I can completely believe someone had no idea what they were doing when copy/pasting, and working on wordpress.
Arguably the term for a bad idea that works is "good idea"