The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality, maybe even job satisfaction …

This is why the 'craft' should be left to open source for most commercial software. The business reality just doesn't care for it. Only when you have a PR problem does the business switch back to signalling quality, like Microsoft, although it remains to be seen if they still have the quality part. Most of the craftspeople get to say 'told you so' but also it looks like a sinking ship to them. Once the PR problem is gone, it's back to shipping at the expense of quality. This cycle conflicts with the idea of a craft, which is that you should do it that way all/most of the time. The business will stop caring about quality long enough that your skills will erode, making it a bad mix. Trying to practice a craft where you aren't in control of this cycle is corrosive to the spirit.

> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend. The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for things that you weren't going to spend time caring about anyways and, more importantly, (2) you can encode these things into prompts (AGENTS.md) and processes so that they happen even when you weren't going to invest the time with or without AI. For a lot of people this only means collecting some generic "skills" they found online yet it's still much better than what they were going to do pre-AI. That's why I think AI is saving software in some ways, not leading to worse softwar…

> As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem? > The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality If you have 10 people eating steak and 10 people starving, then giving rice to the starving people would also sharply decrease dinner quality. AI software is not the difference between good or bad, it's the difference between something or nothing.

I don't have the same rosy memory of the history as you do. I remember very regularly having to wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling and doing all kinds of voodoo I could to get sites to run, sites I used fine the day prior. Figuring it all out on my oh so slow connection and hoping no one calls the landline lest it stops all the progress. Not saying it wasn't a fun period of chaos and I everyday wish for internet to become the wild west it once was. It was acceptable in the sense that I didn't know it could be better, I was used to OS hanging and crashing regularly on my oh-so-fancy dual core system as well regularly so it was all acceptable. Today I find myself having less patience for it all, because things just tend to work a lot more often than they don't. With AI, I find so many small businesses and others I deal with which have their own websites have started to have b…

Personally the biggest conceptual problem with HTML/CSS is that it's incredibly unintuitive with mapping to real-world concepts, and not low-level (or straightforward) enough so that the low-level primitives are easy to manipulate. For example, WPF programs can have great accessibility - this comes from the fact that programmers can manipulate primitives which are semantically meaningful (buttons, lists etc). In HTML its just a sea of divs which lately have become an implementation detail to hang classes on to, and sometimes not even exposed directly to the developer, if you use a SPA framework. There's not a snowballs chance in hell you can build a quality accesibility solution on top of that. HTML's main idea was that HTML was a document model, that described the content in a semantically meaningful way, and CSS was the 'rest' which kind of allowed to make the whole thing pretty - the …

You're describing the state that software was already in prior to AI. Usability, accessibility, intuitiveness have all gone down the toilet in the blind drive to make everything "sleek" and "modern" by removing all text, reducing programs to hieroglyphs floating in a sea of padding. Removing features so somebody can say they changed something . We've refused the notion that software can ever be finished and now have to find some way to justify endlessly updating software forever. AI might make the problem worse, it might not. But the problems you outline and the sharply declining computer literacy they bring are already here, driven 100% by human developers.