To me, so far it seems like it is and it isn’t simultaneously. Some things are going at insane paces. I see things like reverse engineering and emulation breaking barriers. But we don’t see things like the quality and complexity of highly architected systems getting much better, maybe even getting worse as management pushes velocity onto employees.
I think what this shows is that AI is great at tedium and brute forcing, but it’s not actually good at making substantially better software with less of that “rationed” expertise. At least, not yet.
During the hype cycle, making "x for y" is easiest to get funded and exit.
Once the hype crashes and we're in the trough of disillusionment, then people are bearish. So founders either move to the next hype cycle or figure out a more durable business from the ashes
It was much the same with search. Google search allowed us to find things faster at first...but over time websites responded to that and started doing SEO crap. Now almost every search results in a billion websites that say the same thing, but shallowly. Yes you can still find some gems but was it worth it?
AI makes things faster, but now it means we can target superificial needs very quickly...and so a new breed of crap software will be built with it. As long as there's a dollar sign at the end of the road.
There's no reason to think that companies are suddenly going to be spending 1:1 features : quality because both are faster / cheaper .
So expect the low quality to continue, and naturally get worse, because complexity is going up 1000x
I recall something I once heard about product marketing. The experiment was a product like jam, and they had 3 flavour options available in one case and 12 options available in another. It was a test on how hard it was to make a decision as well as how confident the person was they made the right decision later on.
One of Sartre's points on existentialism was that radical freedom leads to anxiety.
In some sense, AI is removing scarcity. It isn't clear to me that this is the same kind of thing as going from starvation to surplus. It is more like the jam case where we aren't increasing abundance in a total sense, we increasing the options within the existing surplus.
Now that SaaS CRUD apps can be built in 10 minutes, we can maybe do something more worthwhile, no? So much wasted effort has gone into this field already, in my opinion.
PaulHoule•59m ago
It's a different view of scaling. I mean a lot of people have this absurd idea of "super intelligence" which is like the cover of this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermind_(novel)
i mean what does "intelligence quotient 10,000" even mean? On the other hand it's very easy to imagine a world where we have systems like the best ones we have now but we can really afford to use them.