Are Devs Becoming Lazy? The Rise of AI and the Decline of Care

> There's a name for seeing the past through rose-colored glasses, isn't there?

> "In the old days" developers had various degrees of skill and care, as they do "in the new days".

Yes, but "various" isn't a fixed ratio. While there have always been unskilled and careless developers, the ratio in the past could have been better and the ratio now could be worse.

Personally I've seen the decline over my career, in my little corner. But I wouldn't attribute it to generative AI, rather:

1. The rise of offshoring ("Why hire a skilled American developer when you can hire ten of the cheapest possible offshore developers instead?"). Skilled and careful developers don't want to get paid the cheapest wages, so this increases the proportion of unskilled and careless developers that you have to deal with everyday.

2. Programming being perceived as a well-paying, desirable job. That changes the kind of people who try to pursue it. When it was seen as mostly the domain of looked-down-on nerds, you got a greater proportion of people who where passionate about it. If it's seen as the last of the good-paying jobs, you'll get more people doing it for the money who don't really like it. This is also a factor in the offshoring situation above.

It's totally plausible that generative AI will accelerate the trends and make them even worse, but the trends didn't start with it.

Any suggestion that generated code is inferior to human written code because the generated code can contain vulnerabilities is ridiculous on its face. Human written code, despite all of the tools we have to assist with the creation of secure code, is full of vulnerabilities AND the problem is getting worse - not better. I guess I should be grateful because developers writing insecure code is the whole reason I have a career, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that just because a human wrote the code it's less likely to contain vulnerabilities than generated code.

A good developer can think about and understand the code they're writing. An AI cannot.

If anything, I'm using llms to teach me all of these security / validation / testing / conventional commit semver squash merge

things that I wouldn't usually know or be too lazy to or have the energy or time or permission to code myself

Would you believe we were once writing code without going online and with just a few essential commercial libraries, if anything besides what our OS and toolchain provides at all? We'd literally have to keep a mental model of our code and all the things it touches and would personally write the utilities we needed to get it done.

Of course it's absurd to claim "every line was written with care" but there really has been a radical transformation in how people engage with the craft and the kind of work they produce as a result.

And the current way is quite hapless in comparsion, even while it enables more people to participate and even if the end products have capabiltiies that people couldn't even consider a few decades ago. As an industry, we make wild stuff now and that's impressive. But as a craft, we're in a very dark place that's looking even dimmer with the arrival of generative coding assistants and bots.