AI is about software abundance. And abundance shifts focus from basic needs to managing excess. There is such a thing as too much software.
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Great way to put it. We go from scarcity to glut and the blocker shifts from the line between ideation-product to product-market-fit, or quality.
The art of optimization is a lost art unfortunately.
Abundant compute, and storage spoiled a generation of devs.
Historically, devs never optimized their code. Very, very few devs even cared about it beyond the "tuning the use of my libraries" thinking. The AI slop of today is more optimized than most devs ever dream to be.
slopware
I like to imagine that forced constraints caused humanity to be more efficient, which led to the abundant, & prosperous times that we live in.
(When measured in the price of hard money, fiat money is fiat, need I say more)
The average dev is too much of an idiot to do well in constraint environments. All they did was to not bother with animations, transparency and rounded corners and then boom, everything is fast.
Programming has also become way more accessible though to be fair with friendlier languages like python, & scratch, compared to harder languages like Assembly, Basic, Fortran, & C, etc.
On top of all the learning courses, certifications, Khan Academies, W3 School, Stack Overflow* (*unfortunately contemporarily considered irrelevant), youtube tutorials, etc.
I’d say the pool of devs has increased but the pool of competent devs has theoretically decreased.
A single1980 dev from Nintendo, IBM, or Apple could go line for line against a modern day team of Devs at Microsoft easily.
Devs in 1980s from IBM and Nintendo were pretty bad too. But we only hear about the one or two that actually made things work. The other 1000 devs just added pixels and screw the code around :)
Like having 50 nostr clients and not a single bot free relay lol
This is why I like working on B2B and embedded systems. Less slop, both Dev and AI.
On the other hand, there also was too much software to survey or understand before AI. Just as there have, for hundreds of years, been too many smart books in the library to read. Earlier one got to drown in the North Sea and now one gets to drown in the Pacific.