> It's really weird, I'm seeing across the board that people who never believed in them before are suddenly all into good software eng practices (starting with writing a spec) because of AI.
> It's kind of fascinating that we never were willing to do these things for humans but now that AI needs it ... we are all in. A bit depressing in the sense that I think mostly the reason we happy to do it for AI is that we perceive it will benefit us personally rather than some abstract future human.
I don't think that's the reason.
I think it's because they take time, and few people were willing to put in time for "maybe it'll make writing the actual code faster" gains when the code was going to take a few times longer to write itself.
You also can get faster feedback to iterate on your spec now, which improves the probability of it helping future-you.
So combine that with the fact that the llms are more likely to get lost if you don't spec stuff in advance, and the value of up-front work is higher (whereas a human is more likely to land on the right track, just more slowly than otherwise, making the value harder to quantify).
Yeah I think a lot of pushback to best practices is basic cost/benefit; I like writing documentation, but I'm also often feeling a bit depressed that nobody will actually read it in as much detail as I wrote it. But LLMs do / can.
Actually there's a lot of projection there too; I don't read documentation in detail. And nowadays, I point an LLM at documentation so that it can find the details I would otherwise skip over.
The destruction of the millennial attention span is real, and it's worse in the younger generations, lmao.
Well it's also just that you have a list of 20 features to add, and if it works, you want to ship it, and someone might even get mad if you spend a day dawdling on best practices and documentation and so on. Corporate cultures generally don't have the same long term thinking about reusability and legibility and fault-tolerance that an individual coder may have about the code they want to write once and forget. (Neither do LLMs, for that matter).
Our reduced attention spans are just adaptation to a world filled with meaningless distractions.
Imagine how crippled you would be if you felt compelled to follow every comment thread to its end.
We're just monkeys looking for the good bits among a pile of rotten fruit.