> Meanwhile I'm watching a community of mostly young people building and using tools like copilot, cursor, replit, jacob etc and wiring up LLMs into increasingly more complex workflows.
And yet, I don't see much evidence that software quality is improving, if anything it seems in rapid decline.
I don't see much evidence that software quality is improving
Does it matter? Ever since FORTRAN and COBOL made programming easier for the unwashed masses, people have argued that all these 'noobs' entering the field is leading to software quality declining. I'm seeing novice developers in all kinds of fields happily solving complex real world problems and making themselves more productive using these tools. They're solving problems that only a few years ago would require an expensive team of developers and ML-experts to pull off. Is the software a great feat of high quality software engineering? Of course not. But it exists and it works. The alternative to them kludging something together with LLMs and OpenAI API calls isn't high quality software written by a team of experienced software engineers, it is not having the software.
Even if that were true (and I'd challenge that assumption[0]), there's no dichotomy here.
Software quality, for the most part, is a cost center, and as such will always be minimal bearable.
As the civil engineering saying goes, any fool can make a bridge that stands, it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
And anyway, all of those concerns are orthogonal to the tooling used, in this case LLMs.
[0] things we now take for granted, such as automated testing, safer languages, ci/cd, etc; makes for far better software than when we used to roll our own crypto in C.
And yet, I don't see much evidence that software quality is improving, if anything it seems in rapid decline.