If people think like you we won’t have jobs because everyone would fucking die when cars, MRI machines, nuclear power plans and ICBMs, airplanes, infra, payments start misbehaving. Now what?
What is the category of code that does not need quality? You need it to not interact with real world, with people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not for real users to rely on.
> What is the category of code that does not need quality?
For example there exist "applications"/"demos" that exist "to show the customer what could be possible if they hire 'us'". These demos just have to survive a, say, intense two-hour marketing pitch and some inconvenient questions/tests that someone in the audience might come up with during these two hours.
In other words: applications for "pitching possibilities" to a potential customer, where everything is allowed to be smoke and mirrors if necessary (once the customer has been convinced with all tricks to hire the respective company for the project, the requirements will completely change anyway ...).
Yeah, that's what I mean - prototypes. The caveat is though that before agentic coding skills to build a prototype and skills to build a production system were generally the same, so a prototype did not only provide a demonstration of what is possible in general, but what your team of engineers can do specifically. Now these skills will diverge, so prototypes will not prove anything like that. They are still going to be useful for demonstrations and market research though.
> That does not mean you are correct. This mindset is useful only in serious reusable libraries and open source tools. Most enterprise code involves lots of exploring and fast iteration. Code quality doesn’t matter that much. No one else is going to see it.
Here? Most of those that I’ve listed IS boring enterprise code. Unless we’re taking medical/military grade.
Maybe you’re too entrenched in the web section of software development. Be aware that there’s a lot of desktop and system software out there.
Even in web software, you can write good code without compromising in delivery speed. That just requires you to be good at what you’re doing. But the web is more forgiving of mistakes and a lot of frameworks have no taste at all.
No but it’s very good. Just upregulating an already existing system is the sort of thing that can evolve very quickly if there’s a big benefit to survival.
Apologies if I'm stepping on a joke, but just in case: Nativism is about cognitive capacities, not sensorimotor ones. All apes could easily communicate just as well as Helen Keller, yet none of them have ever asked a question, much less written a book!
Give language models 500 million years and lets revisit this. One of the reasons robots are harder to reach parity than higher intelligence, evolution has been cooking it a long time.
Well that anecdote is referencing the Scruffies v. Neat war[1], within which the nativism debate was merely a somewhat-archaic undercurrent.
IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".
If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.
Indeed, and somewhat surprisingly some linguists have embraced even this analogy [1] without appreciating the subtext of the title.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047
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