Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

Then why is all my software slower, buggier, and with a worse UX?

Right? Past couple years software quality has taken a shit.

I think this reflects one of the biggest fallacies behind LLM adoption; the idea that reducing costs for producers improves the state of affairs for consumers too. I've seen someone compare it to the steam engine.

With the steam engine, though, consumers made a trade-off: You pay less, and get (in most cases, I presume) a worse product. With LLMs and other machine learning technologies, maybe if you're paying for the software there's a trade-off (if the software is actually cheaper anyway), but otherwise it doesn't exist. It costs the same amount of money for you to read an LLM-generated article as to read a real one; your internet bill doesn't go down. Likewise for gratis software. It's just worse, with no benefit.

Hacker News is full of producers, in this sense, who often benefit from cutting corners, and LLMs allow them to cut corners, so obviously there are plenty of evangelists here. I saw someone else in this comment section mention that gamers who are not in the tech industry don't like "AI". That's to be expected; they're not the producers, so they're not the ones who benefit.

To reinforce that point: we've got the world's most prominent AI promoting company (MSFT), that has finally realized that Windows Explorer is too slow to start.

And this company, with all the formidable powers of AI behind them, can find no way to optimize that other than pre loading the app in memory. And that's for a app that's basically a GUI for `ls`