"If the problem were primarily mechanical—too much typing, too complex syntax, too many steps—we would have solved it by now"
And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written,
or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped.
We definitely have solved the mechanical problem,
and we did so decades ago when wizards
and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along.
Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff",
even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt.
Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence,
but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful...
And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written, or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped.
We definitely have solved the mechanical problem, and we did so decades ago when wizards and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along.
Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff", even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt. Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence, but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful...