Hacker News Reader

Comment by reticulates | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s been somewhat of a mask-off moment post-AI in which we’ve realized that a lot of the careful and considered output we’ve come to expect of some companies wasn’t out of a respect for the craft or desire to produce “good work”.

Pre-AI the attitude was: if we are going to do something, it is going to use up our precious resources, so we should do it well, because our staff are capable and the marginal cost of doing it well vs. doing it at all is negligible.

Post-AI: we can churn out things quickly, we don’t have to worry about resource allocation, churn churn churn!

Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way, but it is a shame for those who love the craft. I think we took for granted the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering. We are now in the ikea era.

View on HN

>> Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way,

This is how I realized we truly are in an AI arms race. Literally every app or website or tool I use now forcibly pushes their "AI features" or "AI assistant" on you instead of just letting you use their products the way it makes sense for you. Stripe just confirmed what OP was saying. Poorly built, poorly thought out software is now the norm not the exception any more.

If you don't win at AI, you will die.

That is the reality for most (software) businesses.

Counterpoint, maybe you don’t die? When I step outside the bubble, I hear many of the same concerns people have always had: they just want the thing to work.

This is a completely ludicrous, dangerous statement. You cannot "win at AI". Noone can. The hubris of believing "winning" at it is even a thing is even more ridiculous and dangerous.

What is it you think you will "win"?

We are now in the ikea era

If Ikea furniture were lopsided, ugly, not-quite-properly functional and traded their minimalist design for a Frankenstein hodgepodge of redundant parts.

I'm thinking more of the design language and lack of modular functionality part here. Ikea stuff is perfectly fine and minimalist, but the FORSBOGG shelf and the GLOMBOR lamp never seem to be built with any kind of underlying design language in mind and may or may not go together. The BLOKKE box sticks out when you put it in the FORSBOGG. Yes there are notable exceptions (KALLAX inserts, etc.)

This is the same problem I see with these Stripe tools. This may not actually be a problem for real users at Stripe.

> Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way, but it is a shame for those who love the craft. I think we took for granted the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering. We are now in the ikea era.

I feel this so much. I thought AI would make it easier to get lots of hand-carved ornate furniture; but right now what we are getting looks like the typical Ikea product line -- a bunch of mismatched pieces by a host of different designers with no common underlying design theme or continuity (I'm talking specifically about the looks and design, not the materials).

If your output is based on best next result, it will tend toward the mode, not even the median.

I have to assume the most common [insert thing] is going to be bad, because more people are amateurs at [insert thing] than are experts. Right?

I have never expected excellence from chatbot generated anything. I have always expected just good enough.

I don't think the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering has existed for many decades now.

What's happening right now is more like, we're moving from a hyper-optimized era of just-in-time manufacturing (in software, this is called "Agile", "scrum", "sprints", etc.) to getting our manufacturing outsourced to another country. In software, the "other country" is AI.

love this idea. the question then is: who has made the Toyota 22R-E of software?

My Toyota is a pre office 365 Microsoft Excel

Hard to decide if the Linux kernel, git, or SQLite is that for me.

I find it interesting that China today is moving in the opposite direction and going as far as banning low-quality exports and stopping this “churn” of products having learnt that low-value high-quantity products are a bad deal all around.

Have any companies mastered high craft at scale (like 1000s of engineers)?

Apple’s hardware side seems pretty great at it. Software maybe less so.

In the classic "the mythical man month", Brooks describes 5000 man years effort in delivering OS/360.

I think by any measure that OS/360 would be "high craft".

Consistently, at scale, and in a durable way: I doubt it. However, I have seen many localized cases of extreme excellence in the places where the company knows it really matters.

Yeah. Small groups within it can definitely maintain it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com