📅 2026-07-17
I think this hits upon a key consequence of coding with AI. Disregarding all the negative externalities, the hype bubble, drive toward wealth inequality, and social posturing related to GenAI/LLM usage, as a practical result, you are able to dramatically lower the initial cost of software implementation. In software development, this cost is a big gating factor in what gets done, forcing developers to be meticulous about choosing what features to work on. However, with AI taking care of much of the work, the software can grow quickly, limited only by the developer's guiding vision. The true problem becomes apparent at a later stage when the software needs maintenance to remain viable for the long run. Feature-laden bloatware is difficult to keep up and running, let alone glitch-free.
It has been said that with AI-assisted coding, the invaluable contribution of the human developer is taste: the human must decide on the proper feature set, keep tabs on code quality and overall architecture, and have a coherent vision of what purpose the software serves. Without taste, the produced software is unwieldy slop.
A responsible developer is able to use AI to find and fix bugs, and improve the quality of the software in ways that would be prohibitively expensive otherwise, given constraints on time and energy. The real question is whether these advantages are worth the total cost of the technology. I also wouldn't ignore the human temptation of letting the AI genie make one's wishes come true: all the nice-to-haves and long-term blockers can be (potentially) solved with a few well-crafted prompts. How long can anyone resist that on high-minded, ethical grounds?
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