Quality in the Age of AI Slop

I think this is an excellent consideration of how the principles of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can apply to programming. I've always strived for Quality in my work, and I struggle today to balance that Quality with speed as I leverage coding agents more and more. I'm able to build whatever I want -- the gap is my domain expertise and taste. Before, my domain was "building and maintaining excellent software" but, these days, that's not enough.

FTA:

...pretentious as ZAMM may be, I really can't stop thinking about it now that we have to contend with the Maw.

What is the Maw? The Maw is the gaping pit of nihilism that has opened up in the middle of the tech industry. The Maw is the explicit or implicit subject of roughly 63% of blog posts now shared on link aggregators like Hacker News, the subject that nobody can resist writing about, even authors who typically write about SAT solvers or microservices. The Maw is the looming threat that has prompted such an outpouring of cris de couer in the blogosphere, which some might view as—though I hope events don't go this way—just the death braying of a highly literate professional class.

...

Quality is related to caring because once you care, once you are interested, you have a vantage point from which to make Quality judgments. These Quality judgments (e.g. "Is this good code?") are based in part on the romantic mode of understanding...

This resonates with me. I keep telling my team: engineering is finding the right problem, determining the constraints, and guessing a solution. Maaaybe the LLM contains a good enough guess, if you're lucky.

The other two aspects are unbounded search problems, and so by definition irreducible.

Good luck automating yourself out of a job, but be careful, you might become an engineer.