I find all those arguments unconvincing. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars. The idea that it would be somehow uneconomical for me to take the time to get it right feels like utter nonsense. I don't have to have much of an edge over an LLM to come out on top once you start to distribute the resulting product. Three months of my time costs $25,000 or so (hey, I'm in Europe, adjust as you see fit), if I can make something just a little bit better than AI Albert who can whip something together for a tenth of the price, my time will pay for itself once you have modest amounts of revenue from it.
And I'm fully convinced that what I do will not just be a little bit better than what AI Al makes. It will trounce it in all quality criteria. But of course, coincidentally with the rise of AI assistance, software quality has completely disappeared from the conversation. I wonder why.
Thank you for making a really important point.
The lifespan of software can easily be ten or more years.
If it takes a few more months to write by hand to ensure correctness and proper abstraction, what does that save over the lifetime of the codebase?
It's a rare piece of software that lasts that long. For the rest of us there's LLMs.
In JS land, for sure; for systems' programming and software made for small and medium companies, that's granted.