Technology

Today’s ai generated code is easy to tinker with and you can do what you like with your end product. Why would it stay that way? Why wouldn’t they engineer it to make that harder? It’s not difficult to make code confusing by changing variable names.

Code obfuscators have existed for decades - they are rarely used in practice, and 10 years back when a vendor provided me a driver in obfuscated code I explained to them: "If we don't get real source code, we won't be buying your products." The non-obfuscated code was in my in-box the next morning.

A year ago, the AI engines couldn't code anything too complicated, successfully. It had to be assembled from "human sized chunks" or it just wouldn't work.

I notice in a code review I'm doing just this morning, the AI is now managing chunk sizes that are annoyingly large, and doing it successfully. At this point, I'm having to apply push-back pressure, not to keep the code working, but to keep it manageable. The same kind of pressure has been necessary for management of most human developers / development teams for decades.

Enshittification wins most successfully in "free tier" products, people who care enough to pay for something do get influence of the products provided - sometimes. Your counter example of automobiles is a good one, along with appliances, etc. The industrial makers of these products have enshittified our legislatures with rules, regulations and laws which protect their industries and enable them to keep colluding to push overpriced under-durable garbage at us with no real alternatives. We need to push back on government for that, that's the level where the impediments to customer influence exist.