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sublineartoday at 6:17 PM0 repliesview on HN

> economic forces will drive AI models toward generating good, simpler, code because it will be cheaper overall

Economic forces are completely irrelevant to the code quality of AI.

> I believe that economic incentives will start to take effect and AI models will be forced to generate good code to stay competitive amongst software developers and companies

Wherever AI succeeds, it will be because a dev is spending time on a process that requires a lot of babysitting. That time is about the same as writing it by hand. Language models reduce the need to manually type something because that's what they are designed to do, but it doesn't mean faster or better code.

AI is rubber duck that can talk back. It's also a natural language search tool. It's training wheels for devs to learn how to plan better and write half-decent code. What we have is an accessibility tool being sold as anything and everything else because investors completely misunderstand how software development works and are still in denial about it.

Code quality starts and ends with business needs being met, not technical capability. There is no way to provide that to AI as "context" or automate it away. AI is the wrong tool when those needs can be met by ideas already familiar to an experienced developer. They can write that stuff in their sleep (or while sitting in the meetings) and quickly move on.