This is too simple of a take. The vast majority of prostitutes are not adult, willing, un-coerced independent contractors who take a short-term engagement. The money is made by the drug-supplying pimps and organizations that groom minors or prey on people who have no other way to support their habit. This is not moral and very different from the theoretical concept of prostitution.

That's not true in my experience. I've had friends who worked in or adjacent to the industry in several countries.

While there are obviously significant numbers of minors involved and some workers forced into it, the majority are not. Most are just struggling financially and trying to support themselves and/or families. Many are single moms. Many well over 18.

I came of age in SW dev when we started with the (database)schema. THis doesn't seem to be common any more and I regularly see experienced devs with low to no SQL exposure. Seems they typically work at an abstraction (or 2 or 3) above the API or maybe the ORM, but would struggle to write the resultant query, let alone profile it.

I'm not convinced this was a good abstraction that really helps us be more effective.

A lot of established dev practices - like this one - are effective with AI generation. Another is the super-valuable but less common product spec that spends a lot of effort and verbiage defining what is NOT included. LLMs are helped greatly with explicit guardrails and restrictions.

I fear this is different from the "code slop jello poured over a bespoke marshmallow salad of a system" problem though. Mostly for the same reasons that Brooks described that make SW inherently hard 60+ years ago. It feels like the JS framework / SPA experience but with every.single. developer. and the 10x "improvement" is just speed.

And let us be very clear: this happened REGULARLY pre-AI, with long-lived systems adding contractors 12, 6 or less months over 20 or more years. Now we have AI that allows even faster iterations of this with even less conceptual integrity.

The big problem: the decision makers(c-suite executives) never really understood what was happening before, so you can't expect them to see the root cause of the problem we're actively creating. This means it will not get the attention and resourcing needed - plus they'll be gone and on to the next one after taking a huge payday for slashing their R&D costs.

Agreed.

I see this an awful lot. Msot recently was presentation of hackathon projects with product managers & executives asking how much work was left to turn them into production features. It's pretty obvious how their brains are spinning.

Ironic that the parent to your post calls out "old men" but sounds about as grumpy as you can get. They are right though; they don't get it.

It's good to have some healthy skepticism, but everything I've seen has felt very legit and pragmatic. It's funny-sad that a lot of people feel THIS is a nostalgia cash-in when Jack Tramiel was one of the least technology-driven, emotive figures in the 8-bit era. I'm OK if they do what it takes to keep the spirit of the Commodore community alive.

Someone broke into my house and stole my Vic20 and tape deck; we used the insurance money to buy a C64 and disc drive. At the time it was very tramatic, but turned out to be a big blessing!

AI was already giving you 100x so we're up to 1000x

and I came into the industry when software was not engineering. Still think this is mostly true (you can call yourself an engineer when you insure your product)

You're right and it's sad. Instead of being more serious about the output of our work, we put everything in the trash and removed all barriers and tools to would have hardened the code. The processes to plan, write specs, and check applications went the way of the dodo too.

I'm glad I work for a regulated industry where we still have some kind of responsibility and pride for what we do. I could never work for the kind of irresponsible anarchy that AI is creating.