Kind of like designing a better social media interface probably pays 100x what a toilet designer would be paid, but a better toilet would benefit the world 1000x.
For example, I went to visit SF as young lad and I was expecting to be blown away given the immense wealth that area generates, but was severely disappointed with what I saw on the street. I used to think my home area of Eastern Europe is kind of a shithole, but SF beats that hands down. Like there's dozens of places on this planet that are way nicer to live in than SF despite being way poorer by comparison.
literally supporting the toilet designer argument.
tangentially, japanese toilets are quite amazing.
There is similar mindless glue in all tech stacks. LLMs are trained on it, and successfully do more of it.
Even AI companies just wastefully do massive experiments with suboptimal data and compute bandwidth.
What the hell are we really doing?
What looked sensible to me is designing a table, form and report in Microsoft Access in 30 minutes without requiring 5 engineers and writing 50k lines of React and fucking around with kubernetes and microservices to get there.
LLMs just paste over the pile of shit we build on.
hot take speculation: we base a lot of our work on open source software and libraries, but a lot of that software is cheaply made, or made for the needs of a company that happens to open-source it. the pull of the low-quality "standardized" open source foundations is preventing further progress.
>ai-generated code is throw-away code
Mate, most code I ever written across my career has been throw away code. The only exception being some embedded code that's most likely on the streets to this day. But most of my desktop and web code has been thrown away by now by my previous employers or replaced by someone else's throwaway code.
Most of us aren't building DOOM, the Voyager probe or the Golden Gate bridge here, epic feats of art and engineering designed to last 30-100+ years, we're just plumbers hacking something quickly to hold things together until the music chairs stop playing and I have no issue offloading that to a clanker if I can, so i can focus on the things I enjoy doing. There's no shame in that and no pride in that either, I'm just paid to "put the fries in the bag", that's it. Do you think I grew up dreaming about writing GitHub Actions yaml files for a living?
Oh and BTW, code being throwaway, is the main reason demand and pay for web SW engineers has been so high. In industries where code is one-and-done, pay tends to scale down accordingly since a customer is more than happy to keep using your C app on a Window XP machine down in the warehouse, instead of keep paying you to keep rewriting it every year in a facier framework in the cloud.