Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who knows, maybe soon enough we'll have specially trained de-slopper bots, too. Fire, meet oil.
The naysayers said we’d never even get to this point. It’s far more plausible to me that AI will advance enough to de-slopify our code than it is to me that there will be some karmic reckoning in which the graybeards emerge on top again.
"The naysayers"/"the graybeards" have never been on top.
If they had been, many of the things the author here talks about getting rid of never would've been popular in the first place. Giant frameworks? Javascript all the things? Leftpad? Rails? VBA? PHP? Eventually consistent datastores?
History is full of people who successfully made money despite the downsides of all those things because the downsides usually weren't the most important thing in the moment of building.
It's also full of people who made money cleaning it all up when the people who originally built it didn't have time to deal with it anymore. "De-slopify" is going to be a judgment question that someone will need to oversee, there's no one-size-fits-all software pattern, and the person who created the pile of code is unlikely to be in a position to have time to drive that process.
Step 1: make money with shortcuts
Step 2: pay people to clean up and smooth out most of those shortcuts
I've bounced between both roles already a lot due to business cycles of startup life. When you're trying to out-scale your competitor you want to find every edge you can, and "how does this shit actually work" is going to be one of those edges for making the best decisions about how to improve cost/reliability/perf/usability/whatever. "It doesn't matter what the code looks like" is still hard to take seriously compared to the last few iterations of people pitching tools claiming the same. The turnaround loop of modifying code is faster now; the risk of a tar-pit of trying to tune on-the-fly a pile of ill-fitting spaghetti is not. It's gonna be good enough for a lot of people, Sturgeon's law - e.g. most people aren't great at knowing what usefully-testable code looks like. So let's push past today's status quo of software.
If I was working on a boring product at a big tech co I'd be very worried, since many of those companies have been hiring at high salaries for non-global-impact product experiments that don't need extreme scale or shipping velocity. But if you want to push the envelope, the opportunity to write code faster should be making you think about what you can do with it that other people aren't yet. Things beyond "here's a greenfield MVP of X" or "here's a port of Y."