Post #2902717

2026-04-29 05:57 UTC

> Let’s hope the winners are slightly less ghoulish than our Oil barons. What a foolish hope! $200,000,000,000 debt. Who well pay it? You talk like gravity doesn't exist! You're wrong if you think that it won't be heavily reliant AI customers like software companies who spend five years removing codewriting skills from their workforce and building up technical debt in their codebase because no one has to understand it in those five years and there's a lot of subtle, hard to spot bugs that got through code review because humans simply don't make those kinds of errors and no one ever had to spot one in their life before claude came along. Did you think that enshitification wouldn't affect the product? Yesterday's computers and cars were easy to disassemble to replace parts. Now it's much, much harder, and it's very common to void your warranty if you do that. Today's ai generated code is easy to tinker with and you can do what you like with your end product. Why would it stay that way? Why wouldn't they engineer it to make that harder? It's not difficult to make code confusing by changing variable names. I could fuck up your codebase for humans by simply swapping names like productSKU and customerID, let alone writing obfuscated code for any purpose whatsoever and with whatever variable names I like. Some software companies are outsourcing their talent to AI behemoths with mountains of debt to recoup. Guess who's going to pay the debt! And what's the point of such a company in the long run? Why are you speedrunning paying to replace yourself? There will be an AI crash and "consolidation", meaning a switch to monopolies or near monopolies. Some companies are shedding institutional knowledge and programming skill like it was waste water. Once dependence comes, value extraction will follow it like disease follows unvaccinated infection. There is already $200bn in debt and growing rapidly. The shareholders aren't going to be paying it. The ai customers are.

Replies (3)

@MangoCats@feddit.it 2026-04-29 12:51

> Today’s ai generated code is easy to tinker with and you can do what you like with your end product. Why would it stay that way? Why wouldn’t they engineer it to make that harder? It’s not difficult to make code confusing by changing variable names. Code obfuscators have existed for decades - they are rarely used in practice, and 10 years back when a vendor provided me a driver in obfuscated code I explained to them: "If we don't get real source code, we won't be buying your products." The non-obfuscated code was in my in-box the next morning. A year ago, the AI engines couldn't code anything too complicated, successfully. It had to be assembled from "human sized chunks" or it just wouldn't work. I notice in a code review I'm doing just this morning, the AI is now managing chunk sizes that are annoyingly large, and doing it successfully. At this point, I'm having to apply push-back pressure, not to keep the code working, but to keep it manageable. The same kind of pressure has been necessary for management of most human developers / development teams for decades. Enshittification wins most successfully in "free tier" products, people who care enough to pay for something do get influence of the products provided - sometimes. Your counter example of automobiles is a good one, along with appliances, etc. The industrial makers of these products have enshittified our legislatures with rules, regulations and laws which protect their industries and enable them to keep colluding to push overpriced under-durable garbage at us with no real alternatives. We need to push back on government for that, that's the level where the impediments to customer influence exist.

Open ##2902718
@MangoCats@feddit.it 2026-04-29 12:55

> Why are you speedrunning paying to replace yourself? I'm old enough to qualify for the next buyout offer, if there is one. Speedrunning "the new tools" is what I have done for 35 years, it has always served me well in the past. Maybe this one backfires? Not my personal problem if it does - disposal of the elderly from the workforce is a tale as old as time, that's what retirement accounts are for.

Open ##2902719
@phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2026-04-29 11:25

>The shareholders aren’t going to be paying it. The ai customers are. It's much more likely that the banks and their insurers will be left holding the bag, and they'll then be bailed out by the taxpayers. There's already negative ROI at even the current loss-leader prices.

Open ##2902720