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Comment by ElFitz | Hacker News Reader

> Shitty will be the new normal.

I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.

I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.

There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?

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There are different magnitudes of shitty.

Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.

Something is lost along the way.

> Something is lost along the way.

Definitely.

My point is more that it seems to have been the way of the world for the past few decades. I’m arguing it’s nothing new, basically a trope at this point.

And once that is said, if we care about it, what do we do about it? Besides just repeating it.

> I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged.

You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.

To be fair with how powerful our computers are, it's a pity that electron apps like bitwarden, spotify are so slow and consume so much resources. I do miss the time when a lot of apps were snappy

I am just going to justify in the future that because of LLMs, there is no reason to use JavaScript, Java, Python etc anymore because of the available workforce. Only then when the technology itself is fit for the job.

Instead we’ll all run LLMs that generate UI from scratch, at run time, using up gigabytes of RAM and who knows how much power on every request and response.

Progress!

(I’m half kidding)

Maybe it’s a process. Many of the transitions you mentioned did bring shitty apps (not all of them, the ones replacing tech for tech were mostly ok, the ones democratizing dev did come with a quality drop), but eventually Darwinism will take effect and trim the long tail.

Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.

The risk is people who incidentally get into software engineering through using agents probably won’t be aware of any of that. And probably wouldn’t care even if they did. And for most software they’ll create, single user, perhaps even single use, it’ll be fine.

And for those who might care about these things, they’ll probably just be facing constant pressure to deliver more, faster, perhaps with less.

One of the issue about literacy in algorithms, data modeling, efficiency, development patterns, systems designs… is that people either aren’t aware of them (and in the best case scenario reinvent the wheel), don’t care about them, or feel they aren’t given the time to invest in learning them (or worse, might be penalized for it).

As you say - "good enough" is always the normal.

"With a punchcard at least, I can verify what the input is! Unlike those new 'transistors' that are so unreliable!"

What do you think a transistor is

A punchcard with extra steps?

Enlighten us.

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