I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat.
I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.
And how do u sum up the tradeoffs so far, or is it too early to tell ? Do u see lots of unacceptable shit making into production that wouldn't have before A.I for example ?
- "micro" level code is adequate. A new feature typically works as expected, and code is well documented. But macro level everything's wacky: no architectural consideration, lots of duplication, dead end paths, dead code. Nobody ever took the time to understand the context surrounding a change and figure out the most appropriate way to integrate it.
- there's no consideration for infrastructure, or how the code is run (my world). Last week we ddos'd ourselves after someone implemented a 1/s poll that runs on every open browser tab, worsened when the frontend's reconnection logic fired 1/s with no exponential backoff.
- zero critical thinking... First thing everyone did during that incident was to ask their LLM of choice why the platform was down. Investigating by hand (and my findings thereof) was dismissed, because surely Claude knows best.
Your point about orphaned records resonates with me, but for a much simpler (or stupider) "use case". I took a domestic flight earlier this year and foolishly showed my British passport as ID. I had returned to the country the day before, it just happened to be in my pocket. My green card was clipped to the front of it. After checking the identification page, the TSA agent flipped through the pages of entry stamps, visas, etc. There, they found all my old US work visas, which have long since expired. The agent was convinced that, since I have expired visas, I must be here illegally and would have to "come with [her]". I pointed out that I have a valid green card, so I'm here legally, and that of course every visa in the book has expired because - well that's what they do. It took 30 minutes, multiple staff being called over, supervisors, etc before I was allowed to continue. At every step, the presence of the expired visas was a mark against me. Never got an apology or recognition that they were wrong, just eventually told I could be on my way. I truly fear that overzealous thugs will use any "evidence" to prove their presuppositions, like your orphaned records.
(I've naturalized since then, and carry my passport card around religiously, for all the good it may do...)
I’d love to know how it went for you and if there’s anything we can learn from your experiences - you’re right that it’s sorely needed! The statistics are getting worse and worse and worse… please feel free to email any thoughts or ideas based on your launch to team @ domain !
This is wonderful! I'm working on a large spatial audio art installation for Burning Man this year (https://oddsockmachine.github.io/ and https://www.instagram.com/oddsockmachine/). In mine, most of the audio moves around the space, but I'd love to borrow concepts from this and have the listener move through the audio field. (That'll have to go on the biiig backlog for version 2!)
Might not count as the great plains, but Mark Sheppard's New Forest Farm in Wisconsin is a good demonstration of a similar approach in a different context.
Not to belittle the difficulty, but as someone who just drove from WY to WI over the last couple days... east of the Mississippi is drastically wetter than western MN+.
