Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes: > I too am concerned about the potential degredation in quality of free > software given the *volume* of bad code that people can generate using LLM > agents, but the objectively worst software in the archive is the product > of human ingenuity and I am dubious that's going to change.
I agree. What keeps me from wanting to take a hard line one way or the other on all this "AI stuff" right now is that in many ways, I see it as just another evolutionary stage we don't really understand the longer term positive and negative impacts of yet. I started out in this reply to write out a long bit about my perceptions of how software development has evolved starting with my own discovery of a compiler for the first time, and how everything since has felt like programmers moving up in levels of abstraction with various pros and cons. But I think that's largely a distraction here, and perhaps best left for another "Bdale, tell us a story!" style "fireside chat" at a conference, or something like that. I'd love to see this conversation focus less on concerns about who is or is not using whatever tooling to help them write code, and more on the longer term support implications. Things that worry me, like what is the preferred form of modification for code written by issuing chat prompts? And what does a reproducible build look like if we someday decide prompts are source code and there's a significant non-deterministic element operating between the human expression of intent or need and a compiled object code? Bdale
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