I think, if it’s similar to how I feel about it, that it’s more about always being able to do it, but not wanting to expend the mental effort to correctly adjust all those 30 places. Your boss is not going to care, so while it’s a bit better going forward, justifying the time to do it manually doesn’t make sense even to yourself.
If you can do it using an LLM in a few hours however, suddenly making your life, and the lives of everyone that comes after you, easier becomes a pretty simple decision.
AI is a sharp tool, use it well and it cuts. Use it poorly and it'll cut you.
Helping you overcome the activation barrier to make that redactor is great if that truly is what it is. That is probably still worth billions in the aggregate given git is considered billion dollar software.
But slop piled on top of slop piled on top of slop is only going to compound all the bad things we already knew about bad software. I have always enjoyed the anecdote that in China, Tencent had over 6k mediocre engineers servicing QQ then hired fewer than 30 great ones to build the core of WeChat...
AI isn't exactly free and software maintenance doesn't scale linearly
> But slop piled on top of slop piled on top of slop is only going to compound all the bad things we already knew about bad software
While that is true, AI isn’t going to make the big difference here. Whether the slop is written by AI or 6000 mediocre engineers is of no matter to the end result. One might argue that if it were written by AI at least those engineers could do something useful with their lives.
If you can do it using an LLM in a few hours however, suddenly making your life, and the lives of everyone that comes after you, easier becomes a pretty simple decision.