> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is.

There are two reasons for this. One is that the people who make purchasing decisions are often not the people who suffer from your bad code. If the user is not the customer, then your software can be shitty to the point of being a constant headache, because the user is powerless to replace it.

The other reason is that there's no such thing as "free market" anymore. We've been sold the idea that "if someone does it better, then they'll win", but that's a fragile idea that needs constant protection from bad actors. The last time that protection was enacted was when the DOJ went against Microsoft.

> Sure, if you vibe code a massive bug into your product then that'll manifest as an outcome that impacts the user negatively.

Any semblance of accountability for that has been diluted so much that it's not worth mentioning. A bug someone wrote into some cloud service can end up causing huge real-world damage in people's lives, but those people are so far removed from the suits that made the important decisions that they're powerless to change anything and won't ever see that damage redressed in any way.

So yeah, I'm in camp #2 and I'm bitter about AI, because it's just accelerating and exacerbating the enshittification.

Someone on the HN wrote recently that everyone who's foaming at the mouth about how AI helps us ship faster is forgetting that velocity is a vector -- it's not just about how fast you're going, but also in what direction.

I'd go further and say that I'm not even convinced we're moving that much faster. We're just cranking out the code faster, but if we actually had to review that code properly and make all the necessary fixes, I'm pretty sure we would end up with a net loss of velocity.