bluetomcat

True, but with Gen AI, we are turning most digital products into unpredictable slush machines that appear to mostly work on the surface, while hiding an incomprehensible amount of behavioural and performance anomalies.

It's what happens when you substitute human causal understanding for probabilistic pattern matching that "solves" problems with layering more problems in a pile of cognitive debt beyond human comprehension. We are compromising our entire digital infrastructure with mindless slop that erodes decades of collective know-how and conceptual awareness about complex systems.

In practice, most software engineering is overengineering. It is adherence to dogma on a wide corporate scale. It leads to an explosion of complexity and bad software. It is the "best practices" that you should agree with, in order to stay employable.

"Software engineering" is the corporate aspect concerned with the "right" way to do stuff, often picking inadequate analogies from physical manufacturing and traditional engineering. It builds the ungainly, monolith dinosaurs and the technical debt. It is OOP, enterprise Java with the abstract factories, MFC, "agile methodologies" and "agentic workflows". It creates the dogma and the ideologies.

"Programming" is the creative tinkering aspect where you start from scratch and approach a problem from a new light. This is how Unix was born. It is the 1000-line program that is composable, fun to read and write and will last a long time.

They are ignorant about the elephant in the room. The input language of a compiler is a formally-specified grammar with well-defined semantics for each operation. It generally abstracts the computation process over a von-Neumann machine, adding convenience features and bells and whistles. What "a=1" means in an HLL is, store that value in a particular storage location, so that it can be accessed later by the same name.

The slop machine reads lousy natural human language that can mean different things in different contexts. That lousy language is then statistically probed for the most likely output correspondence, producing shit that needs to be externally verified.

It has no semantic depth. The sentences and the paragraphs are a statistically viable derivation of existing human text, but once you try to grasp the whole thing with its temporal and spatial dimensions, you are left with a blurry mess that rots your brain. It's a polished, inoffensive and shallow interpretation as written by an opinionated reputation-seeking user of Quora, circa 2019. Assertive, bold, without typos, clean-cut and bulleted, but without an interesting semantic core.

> Why are we using C anyhow?

Because "cc prog.c; ./a.out" offers you the most direct way to interact with your system. Because "man 2 mmap" documents a C API. Because "nm" lists your functions and global variables with the exact same names as the C program.

The relative "lack of features" in comparison to its "better" alternatives is what makes it preferable. It lets you concentrate on the inherent complexity of the problem you are solving, and not on the opinions of vocal people online.

Abstractions are ultimately a tool for humans to manage complexity in a particular class of problem, and to reduce cognitive load. Good abstractions come from imaginative human brains with taste and lived experience. Abstractions are also mind constructs that often have analogies in the real world. Even at the level of the CPU circuitry, abstractions serve that role. An LLM can only spit out what was already invented by humans and stitch it together in a tasteless, erroneous manner.

No. Plausible code is syntactically-correct BS disguised as a solution, hiding a countless amount of weird semantic behaviours, invariants and edge cases. It doesn't reflect a natural and common-sense thought process that a human may follow. It's a jumble of badly-joined patterns with no integral sense of how they fit together in the larger conceptual picture.

We went from expressing computation via formal, mostly non-ambiguous languages with strict grammar and semantics, to a fuzzy and flaky probabilistic system that tries to mimic code that was already written. What could go wrong?