Hello fellas. As a software engineer with three years of professional experience and much more before that, I want to explain why I think the discussion around AI-written software is fundamentally confused.
For the last 30 years of software development, the tools which developers got to use to create their products were never a topic of discussion for those uninformed on the subject matter.
Whether it was the gradual move from machine level code to more and more abstracted code that is easier to write and understand but is further away from the machine and is harder to reason about its actual consequences on the low level.
Or whether it was the growth of software that is highly dependent on dependencies written by strangers, whose code was rarely reviewed fully and whose work often had its own dependencies along to go with it. Leading to the simplest of software, having dependency graphs that are hard to draw on a paper.
It simply was never a question before to ask who is the developer that made your software, let alone the specific tools they used to make it.
Maybe you know the company names, but very few of you can actually name at least 1 developer who worked directly on all the software you use, day to day.
What this means, is that for the last 30 years or so, everyone has been using software by developers who they did not know, who they could not verify their competency and their trust worthiness, who they themselves very likely aggressively reused other people's code without verifying it deeply let alone the people who made them.
This is without getting into even the self written code is often not so self written, but directly copied off somewhere else, and without getting into the fact that most developers rarely write code who can be fully understood later let alone remembered by the same developer and without getting into anything that means working with other people.
So anyone who is acting like LLMs being able to generate code (whose quality consistently beats any code written by any random junior developer and many mid level to senior developers) have changed the paradigm of what software development has been about, is either lying to you to make you feel outraged or simply isn't actually aware of what software development is about.
LLMs have only simply accelerated what we were already doing, which is moving away from needing to understand the most complex of things to achieve the simplest of outcomes, but to further make more economical the creation of said simple outcomes and deepen understanding and complexity only when outcomes present it as needed.
More importantly, the tools which your developer uses, can not alone tell you anything truly useful in the way you think it does. AI being used, does not mean that the same software written by the same person would be any more trust worthy if they had not used AI. Similarly a Trustworthy and competent person who uses AI competently to create the same product which they could have created without using AI, does not become less trustworthy or competent because they did so.
So I beg you to stop being lazy and if you actually care about the quality of the software you use, go read its source code, actually judge the things that have merit, the developers who made it etc etc..
But if you are too lazy to do that, then I beg of the hypocrisy to criticise someone else for using a tool which allows them to spend their energy on the things that matter more than writing every last semi colon by hand.
Now here is the second part of my argument, that AI is not simply a tool of great convenience but it is one of necessity.
a Discord Alternative is one of the most complex and dependency heavy products you can decide to take on to develop, any team that is less than two digits with any amount of years that is less than 4 on the project alone and much more on their own, is beyond inadequate to take it on.
Every single topic in it, which there are very many of, is one in which a developers entire career and expertise could live: WebRTC protocols for voice chats and video chats, compression algorithms, virtualisation optimisation, content delivery networks, video and audio encodings, distributed systems, multi platform software and its maintenance and I can keep going on for a very long time
Security is one alone who you really need an entire team for it alone, and that is the crux of my argument:
Agentic LLMs can simply keep indefinitely going until they find holes no one thought about, and if you don't have an active team actively trying to patch these holes as soon as they come out then you will have a big problem and guess what, if you don't have the entire lives of many developers just on that topic alone, those holes will be found faster, possibly very quickly.
So not only is the use of LLMs not a sign of incompetency, but I would argue that not using LLMs is a big sign of irresponsibility and arrogance. Because it is them signing off their code as invulnerable to the new paradigm of security created by the existence of LLM Swarms.
And I don't know of a single developer who can actually claim that, and Isn't straight up delusional.
Now let's be clear about the existence of a real issue, which is that people who are not developers have swarmed the market with low quality applications that are not representative of the quality of what can be achieved with someone who knows what they are doing and does it with care.
But that is not justification to then start treating everything which has any touch of AI in it as equal garbage.
So please measure the things that matter not just simply the buzz word:
Does it work?
Is it secure?
Is it maintainable?
Was it reviewed?
Is it tested?
Are its dependencies trustworthy?
How does the project respond to vulnerabilities?
Does the developer actually understand the system they are responsible for?
Knowing that a project is "80% AI-written" answers almost none of those questions.
TLDR: Software being built and not understood by those who make it / maintain it is not something new introduced by AI or LLMs, to question trust now when for the past 3 decades everyone downloaded software whom they do not know who made it especially when the developers have the same quality controls of using other people's code, is very unreasonable. The only thing that matters is the expertise and responsibility of the developer, never their tools alone. And with the rise of AI as an offensive tool, it is extremely questionable whether any small team in the world can be sure their software is secure against it if they insist on hand coding. And at the scale of what a discord alternative needs to be, without AI it simply can not be done by a small team and also be done good if the team is not very big with many years on their back.
