https://lobste.rs/~emk wrote:

Similarly it can make bad code that looks really good.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that LLMs have changed the relative price of quality.

Imagine this in terms of houses: Before, a shitty McMansion with a leaky roof and bad foundation cost 1000X. A really good house with no lurking headaches cost 2000X.

Now with LLM technology, a skilled practitioner could hypothetically reduce the price of the good house to 1500X, by having it do some of the more mechanical and easily verified construction tasks.

But the shitty McMansion? That has now dropped in price to 100X.

And so the shitty McMansions are likely to drive out the quality work in ugly ways. I don't like this at all. Personally, I'm not going to hassle the craftspeople who reduce the price of the good house from 2000X to 1500X. But I don't see what prevents the crappy 100X houses from driving anything better out of the market, creating a "lemon market", and causing customers to become much more suspicious about software in general. Lemon markets are ugly, for the reason you described: buyers have no way to distinguish quality from garbage. In software, the most famous example of a lemon market was the great video game crash of 1983, where a wave of absolute garbage video games burnt a huge number of customers and made them stop buying.