Before LLMs, a friend of mine lamented that all the juniors at his gig were really fast at producing buggy code. The greater lament was that his bosses loved it. And as a dev, you're getting paid to do what your bosses want.

LLMs can really help you get what your bosses want a lot faster.

As an older dev, myself, I'd already been bitching about the state of software quality before all of this. Companies just didn't give a shit. Sure, people within them did, but as a whole companies will do the bare minimum to not lose your business (because that's what's best for the bottom line). Can't really fault them for their nature.[1]

And then I step back and look at something like Linux or GNU. Perfect and bug-free? Certainly not. But they're damn fine pieces of software. Many open-source projects have historically been damn fine pieces of software. Because they don't care if they lose your "business". They just want to build something cool that they can be proud of.[2]

It's why so many of us agonize over the details of the things we produce and give away for free. It might not even net us another user, but we have pride in our craft and want to do the best we possibly can.

But that way of thinking is a money loser, at least in the short-term. And companies live in the short-term.

So what's going to stop software from just collapsing into a massive pile of crap?

I don't know. Maybe it just has to get so bad that people start going to the marginally-better competition. Isn't exactly a great consolation to me, that.

[1] Small companies are often idealistic and try to do the Right Thing, admittedly. But big ones who tend to be market leaders tend to not.

[2] Insert the entire GNU philosophy here because I just glossed over it completely and I don't want to get called out on it. :)