cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/36071801
This author trieds hard to do a pragmatic view. He does not mention ethical or ecological concerns (which should matter far more and subject to legal regulation IMO).
Instead, he focuses on the quality topic. His thinking is that companies are doing now a kind of quality arbitrage: Companies can make low-quality code at far cheaper costs, and sellthe result still at human-made prices. Which will only work for so long, he thinks: Customers will demand lower prices. (Easy to imagine a quality downward spiral.)
Which invokes the question: What has happened that people accept lower and lower quality? Is new software nowadays still really useful?
In case of tests, I’ve seen not simply more code than necessary, but hundreds of line of generated test cases focusing on implementation details based on a badly worded issue description, without anyone bothering to check if the generated integration works at all. These test cases are an immediate dead weight for maintainers that make refactoring and fixing issues more difficult.
Don’t need an LLM for that. I found human-made test cases successfully testing for wrong assumptions.