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.