– Baldur Bjarnason
“Why are you being so difficult? This could be a good thing for us? How can you be so sure?”
This was in late 2000. We were having drinks in the Watershed in Bristol.
For those of you not familiar with the Watershed, it’s an art house cinema, media production centre of excellence, conference venue, houses a diverse community of media practitioners, and a bar.
It was the place in Bristol where people in media hung out. Students, writers, artists, academics, film, TV, and radio people of all stripes, writers, and more have tended to hang out there at various times over the years.
I don’t know what it’s like today – I haven’t been to the UK in about a decade – but I’d be surprised if it didn’t still attract that sort of crowd. At least what’s left of it after the past decade of ruin.
When I was studying my Masters in Interactive Media back in 2000, us interactive media students used to hang out there a lot. During one of these hangouts we ran into a small group of people claiming to be just about to launch a dot-com startup.
This was after the dot-com bubble had crashed. Now, there’s an argument to be made for starting a tech or software company as the market bottoms out. Your competition has been cleared out or is suffering. Funding might be hard but recruitment becomes easier. You also tend to have easier access to all sorts of under-priced infrastructure.
This was not that. This was a group of young guys that were specifically starting a VC-funded startup, in the dot-com vein, and making all the same promises you saw in the dot-com bubble:
- “We’re going to change the world.”
- “Anybody who signs up to work with us is going to be rich.”
- “The stock options are going to be worth a fortune.”
- “We have an amazing concept.”
- “No, I’m not going to tell you unless you sign an NDA.”
They sat down at a table full of interactive media students and basically offered us all a job, with stock options and amazing benefits.
I told them to fuck off, although in a not quite so polite language. I’d only been in the UK for a few weeks as an adult by then. I was still speaking with level of bluntness that was even considered a bit much by other Icelanders.
I was the only person at the table who was even just a little bit sceptical. I told the others they’d never hear from these guys again.
“Yes you will,” the startup guys chimed in. They were still at the table.
“If these assholes do contact you, then they’ll ask you to work for free, promising an amazing future.”
“No we won’t.” They were quite all quite drunk.
It was at this point that one of my friends, another Masters student, took me aside and asked me why I was being difficult.
“Because they’re either lying to you, trying to use you, or both.”
“But how can you be sure?”
“Because nothing they’re saying makes sense. None of us will ever hear anything from any of these guys again. Also, weren’t you listening earlier when one of them talked about how he was worried his neighbour was going to plagiarise their idea by listening in on the radio waves generated by the electric wiring in his flat? They don’t sound well.”
“That could be happening! I’m sure I’ve heard about that happening to somebody.”
We never heard from any of them.
People want to believe in magic #
You don’t have to spend much time looking into how faith healers and homeopaths operate to realise that their biggest advantage is people’s unrelenting desire to be fooled. They want to believe in magic.
Even when they know better. Even when the people making the promises of magic sound like they are on the verge of a serious breakdown.
But, often as that does happen, I don’t think this is why I was alone at that table in my scepticism. That was more a question of how each of us saw the industry we were a part of.
You see, this was an evening in the middle of a week, where we had gone out after the lectures of the day ended.
That meant the group was disproportionally full-time students with no family and no day job to pay for their studies.
We were people who had only experienced the web, web development and design, and interactive media as this powerful new thing that held endless possibilities.
And me, the resident grump.
The students who were in the Masters because the dot-com they had been working for fell apart were all at home. The people who were studying because they suddenly had spare time after business for their interactive media studios had dried up were at home with their creepy partner who hit on every twenty-year-old in sight.
If you mostly see the positive in your field, vague promises of a grand future sound more compelling. If you’ve seen the dysfunction firsthand but love the industry despite its flaws, you know that the vagueness hides a lot of horrors and grim disappointment.
The promises made by the makers of various coding tools built with Large Language Models (LLMs) tap into this divide.
Two groups within the field of software development look at the same dynamic, the same behaviours, and the same features, but come to diametrically opposite conclusions.
This might seem perplexing but it makes sense once you realise that software development was already divided:
- Those who believe software development and the software industry has been going from strength to strength – “software is eating the world” – and this is just making that happen faster.
- Those who believe we’ve been in an incrementally escalating software crisis since at least 2007.
Our current software crisis – we’ve had a few – has been ramping up since the US gave up on regulation after the 2007 crash. Instead of reforming and regulating finance, the US decided to let the finance industry take over all of its industries, which hasn’t been great overall, but for software it’s meant that “quality” stopped mattering.
- Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.
- Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.
- Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices (“UGC! No, Web 2.0! No, blockchain! No, AI!”).
- Customer lock-in is a standard tactic.
There is little to no downside to poor software quality. The upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies
Some corners of the software industry are less affected. Others, such as web dev, are more affected.
To illustrate the lack of a downside:
The stock price of the company that caused worldwide outages and economic havoc, Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is higher today than its peak before the outage.
Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences.
This has led to a field whose standard practices are a cluster of bad habits and superstition. Web development is now especially notorious for completely disregarding accessibility, user device capabilities, and regulations. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern developers. Misconceptions about test-driven development and pair programming abound. Code review is the norm even though it’s largely useless as practised.
When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.
They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes.
Those who are most vocal today about the dysfunctions of LLM-coding were already warning about the dysfunctions of the software industry well before the “AI” bubble began. The issues that plague the industry predate this particular bubble and many in software have been concerned about them for years.
Equally, most of the people who today are the most vocal about the benefits of LLM-coding were bullish about software development before the bubble. They didn’t see anything wrong with the earlier state of affairs so they don’t see anything wrong with magnifying that dysfunction tenfold.
Hence, a divide in the discourse around LLMs for coding.
Both see Large Language Models as a mechanism for scaling up existing software practices with minimal human observation.
One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe.
There is nothing either group can say to the other to shift their opinion because the disagreement is down to a fundamental difference in worldview.
But if you aren’t in tech and are wondering which to trust, just ask yourself: do you really think the chucklefucks of tech have got coding figured out?
Or are they a bunch of self-serving con artists sitting at a table with inveterate optimists spinning a yarn of a grand future?
Later this month I’m going to be launching a small project.
The idea is very simple:
What if we give people more options for how they can support a newsletter that don’t involve subscription?
Instead of charging people $25-50 USD a year for a subscription, I’m planning on offering a short ebook containing advance copies of the next few flagship essays I plan on publishing on the newsletter, along with a few thousand words of essays and arguments that are unlikely to see the light of day elsewhere.
These essays use my personal experience with software development and interactive media as a lens for me to interrogate the evolution of the software industry and what we can learn from what we’ve lost.
Buying it will give you an opportunity to see the essays well before they are published and show you the argument they’re making as a whole in a single ebook.
If that sound like your thing and you aren’t a follower of my newsletter, you might want to subscribe. If you’re already a subscriber, then you have my thanks.