Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There’s an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don’t think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that’s a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it’s faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience.
This is exactly what I’m going through. Although I’m unemployed at the moment, I’ve had my fair share of AI coding, and while it’s incredibly impressive what it can do, not only does it make software development completely unenjoyable, it degrades our quality standards (which were already pitiful before AI) even further, and the industry is just in a collective psychosis and completely ignoring the enormous societal and environmental costs. My moral compass just won’t allow me to continue doing this, but what else I will do, I don’t know. I’m trying to switch into cybersecurity, but I have no idea if the grass is really any greener over there.