"The rise of industrial software".
Should we think of ourselves as entering an "industrial" era of software? The term seems odd since I've been hearing the term "software industry" my whole life (it seems like). But Chris Loy explains what he means by this:
"For most of its history, software has been closer to craft than manufacture: costly, slow, and dominated by the need for skills and experience. AI coding is changing that, by making available paths of production which are cheaper, faster, and increasingly disconnected from the expertise of humans."
"Traditionally, software has been expensive to produce, with expense driven largely by the labour costs of a highly skilled and specialised workforce. This workforce has also constituted a bottleneck for the possible scale of production, making software a valuable commodity to produce effectively."
"Industrialisation of production, in any field, seeks to address both of these limitations at once, by using automation of processes to reduce the reliance on human labour, both lowering costs and also allowing greater scale and elasticity of production. Such changes relegate the human role to oversight, quality control, and optimisation of the industrial process."
"The first order effect of this change is a disruption in the supply chain of high quality, working products. Labour is disintermediated, barriers to entry are lowered, competition rises, and rate of change accelerates."
"A second order effect of such industrialisation is to enable additional ways to produce low quality, low cost products at high scale. Examples from other fields include: industrialisation of printing processes led to paperback genre fiction, industrialisation of agriculture led to ultraprocessed junk food, and industrialisation of digital image sensors led to user-generated video."
"In the case of software, the industrialisation of production is giving rise to a new class of software artefact, which we might term disposable software: software created with no durable expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding."
"In the early twentieth century, scientific advances were expected to eradicate hunger and usher in an era of abundant, nourishing food. Instead, hunger and famine persist. In 2025, there are 318 million people experiencing acute hunger, even in countries with an agricultural surplus. Meanwhile, in the wealthiest nations, industrial food systems have produced abundance of a different kind: the United States has an adult obesity rate of 40% and a growing diabetes crisis. Ultraprocessed foods are widely recognised as harmful, yet the overwhelming majority of Americans consume them each day."
"Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods."
The rise of industrial software
#solidstatelife #ai #genai #codingai #technologicalunemployment
The rise of industrial software | Chris Loy
> _**Industrial**_ > > _adj. (sense 3a)_ > > Of or relating to productive work, trade, or manufacture, esp.chrisloy.dev
Greg A. Woods likes this.
N. E. Felibata 👽 reshared this.
Rhysy
•That's fair, and I might be misreading it. But I get a very strong "industrial = slop" vibe from it, e.g. :
He seems to pretty much always describe anything produced "industrially" as of lower quality than that made by hand.
Greg A. Woods
•Isn't it?
I.e. typically industrialisation leads to many compromises required for cost savings, manufacturability, and of course creation of a more "generic" product.
Of course there are many counter-examples where non-industrial processes have lower quality, and many of those no doubt apply to software creation. In the end though I don't think they outweigh the losses incurred, at least not for the average person.
Rhysy likes this.
Greg A. Woods
•Indeed as I read the whole article carefully I find the author making exactly the same claims, e.g.:
Rhysy likes this.
Greg A. Woods
•Rhysy
•It's fun to watch archaeology shows which aren't digging up the homes of the rich and famous. Very quickly it becomes apparent that the average product quality was a lot lower than even IKEA's basic range. The extremes will be different, and debatable, but aren't really relevant when considering the overall effect.
I think LLMs are certainly a dead end in terms of intelligence/consciousness research, although it's fascinating to me just how much they can mimic of true human intelligence. I reserve judgement in whether they're a dead end overall, although I'd be surprised if they aren't an integral part of most AI services for the next decade at least. What they do well they can do very well.
Wayne Radinsky
•I guess I interpreted it differently -- that industrialization doesn't make high quality go away -- he says, for example, "There is a thriving and growing demand for healthy, sustainable production of foodstuffs" -- but adds a new "low quality" dimension. He seems to be making the point that "industrialization" floods the market with low quality goods, and low quality in a way not possible before, e.g. ultraprocessed foods were simply not possible before industrialization. We didn't get an exponential increase in health, we got a juxtaposition of starvation and obesity.
Rhysy
•like this
Coaster and Greg A. Woods like this.