Most rationalists aren't fascists. There are some fascists that call themselves rationalists, but there are also fascists that call themselves libertarians, fascists that call themselves socialists, and fascists that call themselves democrats, so this proves nothing.
This constant equivocation in recent online discourse is tiring. I'm not even close to the rationalist community, I have always found them ridiculous for unrelated reasons, long before it was cool to do so: but I've also engaged with them enough to know that the majority of them is nerds with a science fetish, whose political alignment is about center-left by American standards.
Accusing somebody of being a fascist for telling you to consider the evidence in front of you, and then acting like that makes you the adult in the room, the one who is aligned with social norms and interested in a real debate, is laughable.
> Everything but pump and dump schemes (and perhaps other kinds of one-off
> fraud) has ongoing costs of maintenance, which slop tends to only
> increase. It was never nice to maintain things, but whether you keep
> burning tokens or hire actual expert devs to fix sloppy vibey mess,
> you'll be overpaying compared to if you put high effort from the start.
From my point of view, you're vastly overestimating the quality of most real-world software. There is a million internal applications running out there, powering every kind of business from financial over media to industrial, that evolved from a Perl script first forgotten by a sysadmin in 1994 and then just had more and more crap piled on top of them over the decades. As long as it works for what it needs to do, it will get used. "Software Quality" is a thing that matters only to nerds, and those very few working in sectors where it's actually relevant. But most people aren't writing software to go to Mars or power nuclear reactors.