What the author is describing is an inevitable consequence that happens when the cost of producing something falls dramatically.
It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.
With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh, good enough"-quality content.
The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to care about the details and making sure things were correct. With Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality, "who cares" software.
This makes sense. Recently I learned that there's a collectors market for marbles. Like, people will pay thousands of dollars for a glass marble. Who knew? An article talked at length about the difficulties involved in making a really good marble. There's all sorts of tricky things to manage and a million ways to mess up. But that's part of the fun, right? A collector wouldn't spend thousands of dollars on a glass marble that's easy to make. And if marbles were easy to make, surely a talented craftsman wouldn't devote their life to making them.
It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.
With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh, good enough"-quality content.
The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to care about the details and making sure things were correct. With Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality, "who cares" software.