Here’s my current take on things: First, without getting into detailed politics, the entire frigging economy is going to crash, not just housing. Because Congress has abandoned it’s job, but because everything Trump has been doing is not benefitting most Americans directly.
But let’s look at the computer field. Software Development is half science and half art. Most places ignore much of the science part because they think it takes too much time and costs too much. The ‘art’ part is what causes all of the error, cost and schedule overruns, as well as long-term problems, like technical debt. If you’ve been programming for 20-30 years, and you look at the quality of code these code-gen tools are putting out, it sucks. The code to me looks like it was written by someone who recently completed a 3-mo coding academy and doesn’t have a good grasp of anything other than how to copy-and-paste stuff found by asking Google. It’s crap. The reason for this is simple: ALL LLMs have been trained on publicly-accessible materials, and the biggest sources of programming examples are sites like github, StackOverflow, StackExchange, Reddit, and others. And what you find there are predominantly users who are LEARNING TO PROGRAM. Nobody puts their PRODUCTION CODE up in PUBLIC REPOS! I mean … do YOU? Does YOUR employer? Most employers will fire you instantly if you were to post your work products in a public repo! The PROFESSIONALLY DEVELOPED CODE is 100% PRIVAT — meaning it’s OUT OF REACH OF ALL LLMs for training purposes. This is why the quality of code AI generates is mostly CRAP. I keep hearing that most recent CS grads (past ~10 years) program more by using copy-and-paste techniques than actually coding. And then you have to wonder why they have so much trouble debugging stuff…. You have to wonder what the point of getting a CS degree is when you can learn the same skills watching YT videos and playing on your own machine. Sadly, poorly-designed code that works is just as valuable to a company as well-designed code that works. But the well-designed code takes twice as long and 3x more cost, although the long-term maintenance issues and costs are probably far lower. The problem is, employers are cutting loose the older, more experienced devs to cut costs and leaving the idiots who look at AI code and think it looks great. IT SUCKS! But nobody is listening to us who have been doing this for 40-50 years. Personally, I can’t wait for programming to disappear “under the hood”. After so many years programming, when I get an ideai n my head, I want to see it working ASAP, and coding is like watching grass grow! Computer hardware has passed the point where there’s much performance difference between crappy code and good code, so why should we care as long as it works? We’re living in an "instant gratification" society, where everybody claims to have ADD and/or ADHD, and they want everything RIGHT NOW! Being able to tell AI, ‘I want a Slack clone with these features” and it delivers it to you in 5 minutes seems miraculous. The reason it can do it is that it was trained on 15 open-source clones that it can use as templates. That seems to be what everybody is cheering about. The problem is UNIQUE problems that AI has NOT been trained to address. You’re going to get CRAP, and if you don’t know how to guide AI through a solution path, it’s going to be a long, slow slog thru knee-deep mud. I’m in the process of building something new using a language no AI platforms are very good with. I use Claude mainly, and it’s like an intern that can do refactoring and editing at the speed of light. But it has no understanding of what I’m building nor any framework to figure it out. I give it the pieces to build, and it’s slowly starting to figure out what I’m up to, and that’s really nice. I’m having lots of conversations with it at many different levels, and it catches on better than most people I’ve dealt with over the years. It also has some great attributes: It doesn’t get bored; it doesn’t need to take breaks, eat, or sleep. In fact doesn’t even have any concept of time; so I can stop, get dinner, watch some TV, go to bed, come back in the morning and pick up where I left off and it’s right there where I left it. That’s very cool! How an average person who knows nothing about programming will be able to use AI to build anything truly NEW is beyond me. AI is incapable of synthesizing things. It might look like it is, but it has a big deck of cards with tips and tricks it can draw from (like coding snippets that it can copy-and-paste), and it ends up being like a big combinatoric problem for them. It can generate combinatoric variations until the cows come home, but it cannot invent anything new. Its goal is to come up with something that gets you from Point A to Point B without breaking along the way, and it’s pretty good at that. Just don’t look at the details, because they’ll make you want to throw up. Anyway, about that predicted housing crash … I’m not sure what everbody expects by cheering on a technology that’s going to make jobs held by people with college degrees nearly worthless. I predict that within a couple of years, knowledge-based jobs (what college teaches) will be paying $25/hr, while “trade” jobs will be paying 6-figures. That’s because it will be 10-20 years before AI starts replacing things that involve physical labor (other than sitting at a computer pecking on keys). By the next Presidential election, the jobless and homeless rates will probably be at record highs, along with bankruptcy filings, personal debt levels, and other key economic indicators. And the people running the country say those who are jobless and homeless need to find work before they’ll qualify for any handouts — yeah, the same people writing laws making it easier for AI to take over the economy and put people out of work. I think the French Revolution is a great indication of what might well happen — the billionaires will get the guilllitine and their wealth will be distributed to everybody they have been stealing from over the past 50 years to accrue their wealth. At some point, the inabilty for a significant portion of the population to make a living wage will catch up to politicians and they’re going to pay dearly for it. When it takes three people making minimum wage to afford to live in a decent home and just get by, while the average home price is $500k and rising, and politicans think anybody who can’t live on minimumw wage is an immigrant who’s here illegally and need to be rounded-up and become a ward of the state with no due-process rights, we’re in for a pretty ugly recokening. A housing crash is is just part of it. That will take the banks down, along with the entire economy. -David Schwartz --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
