alyeska

So in your thesis, auditors and insurers will happily accept the intractable nightmare of mainframe code hacked together over multiple decades, often by the lowest-cost outsourced development shop and with the original creators now long retired, but they'll refuse modern, readable, testable code because it was generated partially by AI?

I've worked on the type of legacy IBM systems being discussed here. They're often filled with absurd hacks. VMs running outdated operating systems on emulated hardware because that was cheaper than updating the application. Systems so confusing and poorly documented that only a single employee knows how to update it. Known bugs in software that are solved by pre-processing or post-processing inputs/outputs to hack around the issue.

"Vibe coded slop" isn't going to be any worse than "IBM-outsourced slop" or "Maintained by one quirky IT guy for 15 years slop"

Really quick that leads to not being able to buy anything though.

Sony has done a bunch of evil things (deleting paid media, hiding rootkits in music CDs). Apple abuses their monopoly to force using their web browser and extort a 30% cut of all purchases. Every car manufacturer is tracking every car they sell and selling that data. Retailers are tracking store visits using everything from face recognition to MAC addresses on cell phones.

Boycotting can only do so much. We need regulations to protect people and steep fines for violating them.