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Comment by Alien1Being | Hacker News Reader

AI generated code is like IKEA furniture.

IKEA furniture embodies many elements of good cabinet making but skips many nonessential elements. And does this more consistently than cabinet makers who can be bored, incompetent, depressed, burnt out, resentful, tired, having a bad day.

In the future AI code inevitably will embody most good software engineering practices. And will do this more consistently than software engineers who can be bored, incompetent, depressed, burnt out, resentful, tired, having a bad day.

Just look at the messages on HN or around you at your colleagues to see how mediocre the average software engineer is..

Today's IKEA is good enough for most people.

Tomorrow's AI coding will be good enough for most corporations.

Good enough to vastly reduce the need for fine craftsmen and women / software engineers.

Good enough to deskill those who call themselves cabinet makers / senior software engineers. These days the cabinet makers I personally know just do contract kitchens for project builders.

But IKEA is and AI will be, bad enough that at the high end with special requirements / taste / money / an inflated sense of self worth, some furniture makers still exist and thrive.

Perhaps 1% percent of current software engineers of today will be needed in the future when AI code inevitably has the ability to follow good software engineering practice.......

And as usual it will mainly be the mediocrities that remain ( so there is hope for you too ), with occasional islands of excellence.

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The problem with this analogy (actually one of many) is that most people can make do with a cabinet that is literally identical to everyone else's. IKEA is great for that.

If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI. You need a license to that software! That is just the traditional software model.

AI gives software that is bespoke with hundreds of decisions made, hidden from you, in the background. If it's a throwaway script, that's fine (and I don't mean to undersell this - this is a huge application). If you want a larger program that is going to form part of your business process then it will need at least some level of supervision from an actual expert.

> it will need at least some level of supervision from an actual expert.

An expert? An expert or two? Maybe a few experts? Sure, even that is a lot less than how many we use today. Therein lies the issue.

Yeah, the analogy is more applicable to reusable software that used to be hand-crafted. For example many enterprise systems like ERPs, CRMs, CMSs, etc.

Even in that space there is still plenty of hand-crafted solutions or customization to the enterprise-system that might as well be hand-crafted solutions.

I think the issue with your rebuttal is that companies think they have a very specific problem that needs solving, so they need bespoke software. Just read on the various HN posts where people complain about PMs moving things around for no reason other than justifying their jobs.

Yep. And it's not just PMs.

Everyone with any responsibility for picking any software in a company will work very hard to make things harder and more expensive, rather than easier.

People will ask for a 100k-year app, or whatever is the Ferrari of their business. If they don't get it, they will ask for the complex features they saw in that 100k-year software package, even if they won't use it.

If it internal software, they will ask you to develop it. If it's another vendor, they will complain until they get what they want, increasing the cost. If it's vibe-coded, they will try to prompt that until it becomes a mess.

I had this with all sorts of people: HR, Sales, translators, artists, marketers, data analysts, testers. Even software engineers are obsessed with having the "most complete" in the shape of Amazon AWS and things like that.

The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy.

> The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy.

FWIW you still see this, it just tends to not survive for too long.

Yeah, that's true. Eventually you get the second batch of people who insist on doing things their way, and then that culture slowly dies.

I haven't seen any company recover from that, ever. Once they balloon to 250, 500, 1000, 2000 employees, any attempt to recover by injecting new blood is futile, you only burn out the new blood and enrages the people in the new culture. Then it dies.

This happened to a company I worked for, whose domain just expired this week, I will probably purchase them.

> If you want software that is literally identical ... If it's a throwaway script, that's fine (and I don't mean to undersell this - this is a huge application).

That is the application. AppleScript, VB script, IFTT - and how many drag and drop dev tools has the industry built that were supposed to be for average office workers?

Programers are like master carpenters, and the debates we keep having sum up to joinery and how a chair leg gets turned. Meanwhile there are lots of people slapping up 2x4 and plywood shelves in their garage and bootstrapping their businesses with that.

AI is changing the "is it worth your time" calculation (https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) it's delivering on the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.

it's ~~delivering on~~ jumping on the bandwagon of the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.

most people can make do with a cabinet that is literally identical to everyone else's

If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI.

Hey GLM 4.6 – spot the load-bearing sleight of hand.

Depends on the business. I can easily see Generic Local Späti being fine to replace a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet of what products they've got in stock with a vibe-coded database that can OCR all the business copy of receipts from the till, while also vibe-coding a website and logo that's far less bad than the thing they got by asking their kid's schoolfriend to make both of them on the cheap in the 2015 summer holiday.

Most businesses are small. Most of the employment isn't in small businesses.

> OCR all the business copy of receipts from the till,

I would not do this at all. OCR is still very bad. If you want incorrect dollar figures be my guest.

Sure, but I'm not suggesting it's good-good, I'm drawing a comparison with "a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet".

We live in a world where some genes had to be renamed because Excel evaluated their original names as dates, and genetics researchers used Excel anyway. Isn't there at least a reasonable risk of this happening with a random SKU, too?

Not to overtax the original metaphor but /r/ikeahackers exists for a reason. Giving people fittings and hardware that all more or less work together and a bunch of reasonably high quality fiber boards is often enough to build quite a lot of bespoke stuff. Add a bit of paint and you can (and people have) build gorgeous interiors while saving a considerable amount of money.

I'm not a Luddite or a drooling evangelist; my take on AI coding is basically that it's a good accelerator if you already know the shape of what you want, and have the software engineering fundamentals to build it yourself. I find myself building a lot more stuff these days because I don't have to wrangle HTML and CSS; it's one of those things I know I can do myself but I absolutely hate, and translating designs from my brain to the browser is a horrible pain. But I know, for example, what flexbox is, so I can tell my coding agent that I want something in a certain shape, laid out with flexbox, and it handles the particulars.

I think we have to acknowledge that most software engineering is just putting mostly compatible fittings together to join mostly standard sized boards. That's okay, and unless you're doing something extremely specialized most of the time the standard solution is more than good enough. I've been loving Supabase recently as my backend for AI built things because it turns out that PostgREST is a great shape for >90% of the APIs I would normally build, and RLS handles auth modeling way more concisely than domain code, and it's very easily scriptable to do all the complicated business logic bits in a contained, testable way. It's not optimal, it's not elegant sometimes, but it's fine. Every other engineering discipline coalesced on standard operating procedures decades ago, maybe we software engineers have to swallow our pride a bit and start accepting them in our discipline too.

> If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI. You need a license to that software! That is just the traditional software model.

isnt this the software model that AI is gonna kill over time? You dont need to pay a recurring license fee when you vibe code up a free tier alternative and never do maintenance on it

Depends on if code is the value. Which is rarely is to the consumer. Coding isn't the bottleneck for a better Twitter/Facebook, even if the backend behind it does demand proper code. Code isn't really the bottle neck for GTA6. Code isn't why your Netflix service gets worse by the years.

What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap and it's a shame that we as a humanity have cheapened our lives to the point where IKEA is some kind of standard (and the only thing) most people can afford. Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it. Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer.

(Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot)

There's probably also a factor of less artisanal goods being made but yes, I agree

I think that is false, there is more artisanal furniture today. In the past people had less furniture and most of it was junk. With power tools people can afford more good furniture, even though it is lost among all the junk. Don't forget that good furniture lasts longer than junk and what the past made is kept for decades.

Also with the much larger population today, a small percentage of craftsmen still dwarfs the output of the past.

It's not weird, it's because we define wealth in terms of buying IKEA furniture that we are considered much wealthier than the past. If the affordability of handmade goods or services were the measure of wealth, then perhaps we are much poorer today. I can see how each viewpoint exhibits some contradicting insights.

The industrial goods are what made us all richer and allowed us to specialize even more.

What a sad retelling of reality.

A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well.

Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade.

I think the real IKEA problem is global homogeneity (there seems to be a MALM dresser whatever home i'm in around the world), but that doesnt mean we are collectively living with a low standard.

Names and links or they don’t exist :)

Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look.

Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels. Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough compromise, as I found out when looking for e.g. a TV sideboard.

How lazy do you have to be... within seconds of hitting ikea.com:

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skogsta-table-acacia-black-0045... https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/hemnes-chest-of-6-drawers-white...

The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).

For chests of drawers and bookcases they have one configurable wood product. All the storage solutions for the living room are tiny and almost all of them are made of unstained pine. For wardrobes they have two products, one of which is open and looks bad and the other’s tiny.

There are no wood equivalents to Pax, Platsa or Besta, the Ikea workhorses with a modern design. And even if they existed, I don’t think people would rush to buy them. Solid wood’s not what Ikea’s known for and would cost too much for their target market.

I’m not saying they’re bad - I own several of their products, and while I’m overall pleased with them, I don’t love them. The compromises and cost-cutting design choices are always there if you know what to look for. None of my Ikea furniture brings me joy or makes me want to touch it. It’s functional and looks decent to good.

Hollow panels are too light, not robust enough and essentially unrepairable. One could buy some Ikea pieces and cut them / adapt them in irder to upgrade them. These panels make that impossible.

I disagree with this sentiment, IKEA furniture is much more sustainable than artisanal furniture. Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources. With increased electrification this problem is being drastically reduced and the wood is sourced from re-grown tree farms (which also have their environment problems, but it is nowhere near as bad)

I am from Brazil and before the recent soy-growing deforestation of the amazon the #1 cause of deforestation was furniture-making. My parents have a really old dinner table made from high grade wood, is it is a pain in the ass to move and it has a ton of scuffs we can't be bothered to fix. Once my parents move we will probably throw it away. It lasted 40 years (with a big varnish rework around 25 years in) but the trees used to make it will never come back, my ikea table has been with us for around 8 years and still works fine.

Particle board tech has come a long way and it is much better than it used to be, IKEA particle board is consistently "okay" to "great", but other manufacturers it is not guaranteed. The only thing it lacks (by design) is the weight, particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture, which is both good and bad depending on the situation (some types of furniture you want to be heavy).

This seems delusional to me, being older and more experienced with how long IKEA stuff actually lasts.

8 years is long for IKEA furniture, usually something has irreplaceablely broken by then.

IKEA also refuse to sell you spare parts.

Give me real furniture anyday.

Quite a long comment to write that you've never once seen ikea furniture.

I live in Sweden now, so yes I have seen some IKEA furniture around.

> IKEA also refuse to sell you spare parts.

Sorry to call bullshit but I think that’s exactly what this statement is.

Just looking at our wardrobe and thinking about how it’s actually not one thing at all, but made up of dozens of different SKUs, and how I could reorder any of them individually if I needed. There are also third party sellers of parts such as runners, door rails, and the like (not that you need them since these can all be purchased from IKEA anyway).

The challenge with IKEA is colours: they used to offer more colours, but now lots of stuff is black white, grey, or beige with no other options (and sometimes white is the only option). If you need to replace a part in a colour other than that nowadays, you’ll perhaps find it difficult to impossible.

IKEA sells spare parts and for small items (like bolts and fittings) will send them for free.

Depends on the specific piece of furniture, and how well you treat it. I have had quite mixed experience. Its not going to last like expensive stuff, but its generally far from the worst.

> IKEA also refuse to sell you spare parts.

dont they just give the spare parts away for free?

just show up at the help desk saying your box was missing a few pieces and theyll give you more

... i have ikea furniture thats ~20 years old, still kicking

the ikea cabinet set is ~25?

> Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources.

It also lasted a lot longer. I have inherited furniture that must be around a 100 years old now and a lot that is over 50 years old and doing fine. A lot of my friends have older (even hundreds of years old in a fe cases). A lot of IKEA furniture will go in a decade or less, and they are far from the worst - I have chucked out furniture after three or four years. My IKEA wardrobe has deteriorated after five years.

You do not have to make better furniture by chopping down virgin woods. You can get timber from well managed forests. It is also an incentive to grow trees to maturity. You can upcycle things (the largest bit of old furniture I have got rid of went to someone who did just that). You can make better furniture by better use of recycled materials.

> particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture

It slowly buckles under load which is bad for things like bookshelves.

You've never seen ikea furniture if you think it lasts less than a decade.

Did you read my whole comment?

I said some lasts less than a decade, and I have quite a lot of IKEA furniture. I also said its better than most cheap furniture.

I even mentioned a specific piece of IKEA furniture I own that is clearly not going to last a decade.

There are definitely different tiers. I've bought simple shelving that began to fall apart within years (Billy maybe?). I have 10 years old bedroom furniture still going strong (Kallax/Malm).

I moved a lot, and in different countries. I bought different IKEA furniture pieces. There's no one size fits all. IKEA is different by country, by price, by product line... For example, I have a bed I bought from IKEA made of pine wood. Just a few years old, but it shows no signs of wear, and there's no reason for it. On the other hand, I've inherited kitchen countertops and cabinets from the previous owner, and judging by the tags, they've started their second decade sometime this year. It's particle board all the way. The hinges have completely destroyed the nesting in the doors. The doors, literally, fell off. The countertop bent because of weight, temperature, humidity... it's the kitchen after all.

I've been trying to fix these things as the problems appeared, but, really, most people in this situation would probably tear the kitchen down and put the new one up. It's ironic, because we live in a "historic" neighborhood, where the houses have been built in the 18 hundreds and some, perhaps, even 17 hundreds. But absolutely nothing in these houses is more than a decade or two old. They also use materials that superficially resemble the old stuff: plastic panels with wood-like texture, unnecessarily thick aluminum window frames that resemble the old wooden ones (and open in the wrong direction!), plastic shingles that look like ceramics... And everything is made of crap. So much so that the whole neighborhood is perpetually under construction. It's like the Winchester Mystery House that its owners keep building in hopes to stay alive.

Doesn't last through undergrad in most cases. Mostly because you move a lot.

undergrads are also drunk and partying a lot.

the drywall also doesnt survive angry drunk undergrads punching through the wall, or practicing sports inside

> I have inherited furniture that must be around a 100 years old now and a lot that is over 50 years old and doing fine.

The rest of the furniture didn't last long enough to be inherited.

Damn, you think Ikea furniture is great?

Useful, or passable, sure. Great though?

"The only thing it lacks is weight." You must be being a bit hyperbolic no? Have you ever looked at artisanal/quality goods in comparison to IKEA? You can't see any quality difference?

I varies widely on piece, but even some (not all) of the cheapest wood stuff they have are pretty remarkable quality (or maybe I should say durability, the design side is still super simple for flat-packing optimizations). The non-entry-level stuff is quite good in my opinion.

But on some other stuff I tend to agree, their sofas are pretty bad in my opinion. The beds are okay, but even the non-cheap ones aren't "great".

The sustainability has to be weighed against the fact that cheap furniture doesn’t last. I know people who had to throw away furniture within just a couple years, because it was breaking down.

Meanwhile, I also know people who own pieces that are 50 years old. They look incredible and function great. Of course, we have a culture of consumerism. Most people have no desire to own or maintain something so old, they want new.

Back in the day artisans took care of horses and new have cheapened ourselves to use stinky cars. Back in the day we built computers with relays by hand, now we have cheapened ourselves to use weird semiconductors and use inefficient python code instead of highly optimized hand crafted assembly.

Maybe we should go back to hunting and gathering?

Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely.

A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most.

IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not like IKEA brought down the price to dirt cheap, it’s just like half or one third the price. What great thing will society lose if we ban IKEA tomorrow. People will spend a bit more on furniture, but they will have artisanal quality furniture and more artisans in society. That’s a trade I’d take any day.

IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture.

That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality.

Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for.

Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.

Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture.

If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral.

Cheap furniture used to _look_ cheap before IKEA.

IKEA is actually an example of a particularly horrible trade in this category. Claude estimates wood furniture price fell by 60% with IKEA. Plastic furniture on the other hand is 99% cheaper, far better at distributing furniture than IKEA ever will be.

So what did IKEA do, marginally cheaper furniture, complete destruction of demand for artisanal furniture (me alone buying some artisanal furniture is not propping up demand), apparently all our great wood workers should learn to code right now, but no worries LLM will code cheaper than them now, so maybe they should become YouTubers next.

And the particularly galling fact in this stupidity is the quality of the product is worse. Everyone now lives with worse furniture, the extra dollars they save, I guess they spend it on Netflix now, and we destroy a large avenue to express, human creativity, skill and craftsmanship for slightly cheaper furniture, lmao even. We will be perfectly fine with plastic furniture for the really poor, and higher quality more expensive hand crafted furniture for everyone else, they can maybe subscribe to Netflix less in return.

ikea made furniture easy to move, and easy to get furniture you actually want, vs being stuck with old stuff where the drawers are all stuck and its too heavy to move.

Ikea sells quality stuff as well. Also it's good that we can now afford furniture where our ancestors would have a couple of chairs and a half broken table passed down for generations.

Personally I'm quite happy that dropping a plate on the ground isn't a terrible event.

> What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap

The first time I saw GenAI compared to IKEA, it was for this reason, ~"particle board is fine for furniture, but you really don't want it to be a load-bearing part of your house".

> Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer.

Shakespeare's will gave to his wife his "second best bed"; if a relative of yours wrote in their will that you'd get a fancy antique bed, would you want it?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will

> (Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot)

This was true in the past, too. The historical artefacts we mostly see are the exceptions that survived, not what average people owned.

The tightly-packed wooden homes of London before the Great Fire just aren't there any more, and even fancy places in the same category as now-iconic British country houses were not immune, "around 4,000 were demolished between 1875 and 1975" according to https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fal...

But..

Most enterprise software written by your colleagues is mostly cheap particle board crap.

At least IKEA furniture is usually reliable and does not fail catastrophicaly unlike the crappy bug ridden enterprise software we all have deal with...Jira, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, etc...

Mature AI will be better than the average mediocrity that calls himself a software developer.

the "code isnt the hard part" says that the quality of the code might be higher, but itll be just as buggy because the hard part was always about communicating the right thing to build

code written by ai that the end user cant complain about or communicate their complaints about will be just as bad as hand crafted artisan code that the end user cant communicate complaints about or influence

Survivorship bias, you see only old tables or chairs that lasted, you don't see all the crap that didn't make it to present times.

False dichotomy "if it is not IKEA it is 'artisanal' great quality" — well — no our forefathers would be able to afford whatever quality had local woodworking shop and imagine that a lot of places didn't have best of te best... So IKEA made average quality much better.

Expectations of society have changed. This cannot be discounted.

That old furniture was also expensive. A family would save up and buy a piece, use it their whole life, and often pass it on to children or other family members.

These days, with IKEA, Wayfair, etc, people throw out and get all new furniture every time they move, or even just to refresh a space. They do this because the furniture is cheap. If they saved up for a year to buy a kitchen table, it would be used for a long time and not get discarded and replaced along with fashion trends in home decor.

The high quality stuff is still out there, it’s just that most people don’t want to pay for it, as we don’t see furniture as an investment anymore.

People seem to have no problem paying $1,000 for a phone that they’ll replace in 2-3 years, yet they won’t spend $4,000 on a kitchen table that will be used 3+ times per day by the whole family for 50 years.

Genuine question: but are there still people eating meals in a home dining room in the 2020s?

Or is this just inertia of expectation from the 20th century from folk who expect "well that's just what you do" even though their dining room tables are presently covered in unrelated "temporarily put there" items?

> Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it.

I'm pretty sure this is not correct. "Back in the day" artisanal solid wood furniture was so expensive that you would buy it once and keep it your entire life and then your children would use it after you die for their entire life. It was not even the same ballpark of price.

But it may have been after amortization.

The conceit is similar to "ordinary plates vs paper plates".

Nobody is arguing that a single ordinary plate is "cheaper" than as single paper plate, but one can still argue about how TCO of a set of ordinary plates vs constantly buying a stream of new paper ones just to throw them away after each use.

Ikea furniture doesn't just break, usually. You can have the same Ikea furniture for decades. Even if it did though, you can also still buy the solid wood Amish furniture for a reasonable price if you're intending to keep it your entire life. A big Amish couch is ~$5k on the high end. A big Ikea couch is $1-2k, which people can and do buy multiple times.

It's just that people expect that they should be able to replace their furniture every five years on whims, and it also be high quality, and it also be cheap. That's their problem.

However, Ikea furniture does not tend to collapse a critical moment 90 days after it's been put together because it was unforeseen that the cup you sat on the table would be green, which it wasn't designed to account for.

Software isn't furniture, in other words.

If it's been through a move it just might.

Just what I need, to wake up and read yet another baseless "soon your job will be replaced" prediction.

...ah the classic middle manager analogy of code is X, where X is nothing like code at all but is being used to drive a point that is just standing on poor grounds.

keep it, we have been through "is like building a house", "like following a recipe", "like a living organism", "like $SOMETHING_WITH_COMPONENTS", etc...

we can handle your IKEA furniture, thanks you for your contribution

Having not been formally verified, almost all software today feels cheap. Maybe an AI can change that at some point.

Yay let’s lock ourselves into the formal verification toolsets, so that we can never use new language features again.

OR new languages and frameworks ever again, since they'll slow down code generation due to lack of training, and from LLM generation standpoint this is a terrible thing to trade off.

Both this and the parent takes are exceedingly odd - don’t you think that it’d lead to the language features also just getting the same proofs, as well as better libraries and frameworks? And do you not think that this would also lead to the LLMs both outputting better code since they’d be trained on the verified stuff and also because we’d have tooling to let agent loops autonomously resolve most of the issues with what they output?

I’d rather wait 5-10 years for a stdlib way of handling JSON, XML, YAML, TOML and other formats than using unproven libraries made with unserious practices that have edge cases. The same applies for processing requests, doing any sort of multiprocessing, DB interaction, validations, hell even any and all front end work all they way down to CSS. Don’t even get me started on desktop and server software and OS stuff.

Maybe then software engineering can be treated like real engineering.

Yes. Correct software is more important than developer convenience.

Business value is more important than correctness

When you board a plane, don't you love thinking about how the controllers can make use of the hottest new language features? Perhaps JSON in the stdlib?

Would you board a plane designed by AI that no engineer had ever looked at?

Or some engineer did give a cursory glance at and stamped it with LGTM?

By Dijkstra's standards, we've been vibe coding for an entire century!

I had similar thoughts recently, that now that machines are good at writing proofs, this could help with their reliability in software development.

Then I had a funny incident where an LLM implemented a feature completely backwards. Plenty of tests were supplied which demonstrated that the completely broken feature was correctly implemented.

I realized that formal verification would not have helped here, if I had left the task to the machine. It would simply have written a mathematical proof of the correctness of the incorrect feature!

Apparently this is an issue for humans as well, called the "spec gap" or something like that.

It is the reason why user stories were established, so that the person interpreting the spec knows why. Generally speaking this reduces the likelihood of this gap occuring with humans significantly. At least when they're not incompetent.

Of course, but that doesn't mean formal verification isn't a huge step forward.

> Good enough to vastly reduce the need for fine craftsmen and women / software engineers.

By your own description: No. Maybe good enough to replace mediocre-and-worse developers, at best. You have to invest disproportionate work to coax better-than-mediocre work out of an LLM.

Ikea cabinet is pleasant to look at, and its design makes sense.

But how many times can you take a piece of Ikea furniture apart and put it back together again? I have friends who have moved apartments with the same Billy bookshelf 2-3 times and if they tried it one more time the thing would collapse.

Not to belabor the metaphor as heavily as my friend's Billy, but there's a maintenance corellary to be made here. Most Ikea furniture can be put together once, in one place, and left there for a long time. But once you want to change it in place it may just collapse.

These are acceptable tradeoffs in many circumstances. It's good that this kind of option is available, while there are other options for people with different priorities.

> But how many times can you take a piece of Ikea furniture apart and put it back together again?

How many times can you take apart regular furniture and put it back together again? Most furniture doesn't come apart at all, just move the ikea furniture like you move any other furniture don't take it apart every time and you are fine, it would be weaker if it was possible to disassemble it without issue.

While I agree with the sentiment that there are tradeoffs, and I, personally, have a bunch of Ikea furniture that I'm happy with since it does exactly what I need it to, I think "just don't take it apart" doesn't work so well with cheaper pieces.

I had to move an Ikea dresser from one room to the other and back again, and I don't think it particularly enjoyed it. It seemed quite fragile, and I had to pay attention to not twist it too much. Whereas my grandma's furniture, which was much more solidly built, seemed fine during a long-distance move. Ditto for a Besta TV stand, which seems fine if pressure is applied from the top, much less so if I try to lift it or if it's pushed from the side.

You also cannot move most Ikea furniture without it falling apart, so taking it apart is actually the least damaging option. (Some of the higher end lines are okay)

Its a mistake to take it apart.

The problem is made worse because people are more likely to buy cheap furniture if they are likely to move anytime soon. There is no point investing in good furniture that might not suit the next place.

Depends on the models and your definitions of words. I've taken my Ikea table apart 3 times now and it is still absolutely rock solid, it has inserts for screws and they looks like can be re-assembled at least a few dozen times without any issue. I've also used an ultra cheap lowest tier possible, small table from Jysk which was absolutely a cardboard inside and weighed a like a feather, it was even cheaper than lowest Ikea tier. It worked for 3 years and I disassembled it's legs mounted on the self-tapping screws twice and gifted it to a neighbor recently so that would be a third time. It was still just fine, I didn't even need to drill new holes for the screws. Kitchen and wardrobes from Ikea will likely last decades without much issue.

Ikea sells cardboard things, they also sell wooden massive furniture too (surprise) and anything in between. The quality is appropriate for all tiers and they don't collapse after a single disassembly.

You pick cheapest most replaceable item from all there is in IKEA and make it an example?

I move furniture in one piece if possible to fit the door. The screw inserts and plugs etc wear out fast if reused.

Would say it really depends on the area, also don't have historical data how many 'cabinet makers' there were before around here, but I have been trying to get a custom built cabinet (really simple, just exact measurements to make most of a small space) for a year or so. All of the cabinet makers are so overbooked, that they don't even give out quotes anymore. So ymmv, but I think it also fits this analogy.

> In the future AI code inevitably will embody most good software engineering practices

That is not inevitable. It's a big maybe.

Today's leading-edge AIs are still far from being good software architects. I constantly have to steer them away from producing spaghetti code.

Maybe AI will get there one day. But today's leading-edge models aren't even close yet.

LLM output is not like IKEA furniture at all. IKEA furniture is mass produced, identical, furniture that can be combined to accomplish some lifestyle goal.

LLM code is different every time. Sometimes it’s better than the finest custom carpentry. Frequently it is much worse than IKEA quality (in the metaphor).

I thought the whole software engineering profession was built on making more "IKEA-like" programs. Design patterns and general reusability are the pre-cut, pressed particle board, screws, and Allen-tool sets.

Is IKEA just a drop in for "cheap crap" in this analogy? It's not like all furniture is IKEA by a long shot.

I guess in terms of "IKEA is fine if you're 23" AI is fine for throwaway work.

No, coding is more like building.

A garden shed can easily be built by an AI. A house? Maybe with supervision. A skyscraper? Good luck with that!

And no, garden sheds do not represent 99% of software.

Sure, but neither do skyscrapers.

AI is getting better and better at "house" level building, especially with some supervision.

I don't think most projects can be as simple as your metaphor points to. Nobody wants to stop at 6 parts single use programs.

The problem with this analogy is responsibility. Same set of problems if you have a self driving car imho. Not?

> “Tomorrow's AI coding will be good enough for most corporations”

Or for small businesses today who have a need to get things done, but not the knowledge to hire or manage a skilled programmer, nor the budget to pay them what they deserve.

I find most of the a16z podcast detestable (ethical & morally), but every now and then an episode is interesting or insightful. Here two founders are giving their time to their dentist’s business needs.

Which is to say, the dentist has needs but not the ability to solve them hisself or hire someone. Nevertheless I see opportunities for in-house staff who are working in parallel roles, to take on LLM coding and offering those owners solutions that they can’t hire, or buy—someone who knows the business and can get things done.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id8428187...

> Perhaps 1% percent of current software engineers of today will be needed in the future when AI code inevitably has the ability to follow good software engineering practice..

So who talks / prompts the agents to do the work - the PM ? he will do his normal job of figma designs, customer strategy , high level requirements etc etc + do all the back and forth and validation with the agent for the actual coding?

Will it be a new type of job or will we still call it a software engineer ? And if its a software engineer why do you determine it is only 1% of current software engineers - and if indeed only 1% then how soon does it happen - will it be in 3 years ? 5 years? 15? Dario said last year that this year maybe 50% of white collar new entries gets decimated. Has it happened? If not why not?

Our predictions currently suck ass. I'm not saying you're wrong - but you could be very early which is almost the same as being wrong. I don't really care if software development as a career collapses in 10 years. I really do care if it happens next year.

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