I'm going to predict there will be a movement into "build it in house with LLMs", these things are going to be expensive, they are going to fail to deliver or be updated and there will be a huge bounce back. The cost of writing software is very small, the cost of running and scaling it is there the money is and these people can't have their own IT teams rebuilding and maintaining all this stuff form scratch.
A lot of them will try though, just means more work for engineers in the future to clean this shit up.
I think there's a good chance. These things happen in cycles. A few decades ago it was common for companies to have in-house software development using something like COBOL or maybe BASIC (and at that time, sofware development was a cost-center job, it paid OK but nothing like what it does today). Then there was a push for COTS (commercial of-the-shelf) software. Then the internet made SaaS possible and that got hot. Developer salaries exploded. Now LLMs have people saying "just do it in house" again. Lessons are forgotten and have to be re-learned.
Is there anyone doing dev work that operates in an environment where people can clearly articulate what they want? I've never worked in a place like that in 20 years doing software.
Most of the time when someone adds these fancy languages what happens is that they leave and the ones left are the ones that have to deal with the shit that was produced.
I'm going through this now, having to deal with code nobody wants to touch because it is overly complex, has no documentation, and is in a language no one else knows. Now, whenever i see an effort like this, to bring an exoteric language for absolutely no good reason, i try to kill it as fast as possible.
I don't want to be the victim of this code in the future or have my team bear the cost of maintaining stuff they don't understand.
I have the same problem, people are trying so badly to come up with reasoning for it when there's just nothing like that there. It was trained on it and it finds stuff it was trained to find, if you go out of the training it gets lost, we expect it to get lost.
I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance.
As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory.
The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
It comes down to the amortized cost of insurance vs amortized cost of not. Say nothing about how incentives get fucked all to hell by breaking things across many parties (principal agent problem) and the money distorts things.
And this isn't just insurance. Just because someone who work is being made for by law or by rule says that their work output reduces the failure rate from X to Y doesn't mean that the cost of their work when applied to everything isn't a massive loss compared to just not paying for that and cleaning up the mess X times instead of Y times.
You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
Costs to clean up a mess from an underregulated industry can be bigger then the whole industry causing it. This is not even untypical.
Examples: Leaded gas, tobacco, CO2 emissions, dam breaks, reactor meltdowns, air pollution (really pollution in general; river/groundwater contamination for your septic tank example)...
If you underregulate, you end up with frequent cases where not even imprisoning and dispossessing everyone remotely involved/culpable is gonna get you sufficient compensation; this is extremely undesirable.
Companies are frequently gonna steer towards such scenarios, too, because they can allow them to externalize costs.
Compare against the typical OCED nation, US spending ~18% gdp on health, about ~8% higher than OECD average, i.e. 2T+ rent extraction per year for net lifespan that is statistically worse than OECD average. 6 months of US excess health spending buys you entire HSR system in China that's frequently being panned as overbuilt and wasteful. Meanwhile look at recently built Brightline Florida, with ~120 deaths per billion passenger km, normalize that to EU, JP, PRC HSR billion passenger km, you'd get 15k, 50k, 310k fatalities per year. Imagine PRC losing Cincinnati every year due to rail deaths. Now Brightline extra dumpfire execution but just to highlight at some point there's too much red tape, and red tape doesn't always buy you value. Sometimes the system is so broken and you end up the worst of both world quadrants: high cost rent extraction & less than first world outcomes because the accumulation of redtape itself is leading to substandard outcomes. AKA premium medicore. Extra worse in some sectors when it's not simply opportunity cost inefficiencies, i.e. you lose on something else. A sclerosic money flow recycling maximizer can also makes the thing it's pumping money into worse than expected.
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