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Aram J. French | website
Transcript
A single panel comic with a malformed, slightly damaged, yet freshly built home in the background. In the foreground, a man in a hard hat and a reflective vest is speaking to another man, presumably the buyer, saying, βItβs called vibe construction. Iβm not even a contractor! Pretty soon all buildings will be made this way.β
And they will be selling it at the current house prices, keeping all the reduced cost to themselves.
Congrats weβve looped around to why construction regulations exist
Iβm guessing most commentary will be about software, but there was an analysis I heard of, claiming that construction is one of very few industries across economic sectors that just hasnβt made any kind of efficiency advancements in decades. Most other systems follow some kind of workflow improvement, or inventions that significantly improve some part of the process. But home building has only gotten harder and more expensive for making the same homes as before.
Maybe weβre seeing the same in game development. You look at what games were made during PS360 on multiple odd architectures, low memory, and comparatively small teams, and see how much things are faltering since then.
Homebuilding in the US did make some serious efficiency improvements, just many decades ago rather than a couple. Sheetrock is massively more efficient than lath-and-plaster, trusses are more efficient than onsite rafter roofs, and prebuilt windows and doors are more efficient than the older casement windows and hand-hung wooden doors. Never mind that these more efficient alternatives are much shittier in so many ways than what they replaced.
More recent efficiency improvements have been confined to massively underpaying construction workers and bribing inspectors to cover up the incredibly shitty quality work this inevitably produces.
I've long said (well before AI) that we must have similar kinds of regulation for software, especially software that is used as infrastructure. This includes ~all social media, operating systems obviously, productivity software, shopping websites/apps... It's all the wild west, with so many dark patterns and predatory tactics, all of which regulation would ban. Software engineers would have to be certified and personally responsible for their design, just like civil engineers.
It would have to be balanced somehow with software freedom. I don't want to add any barriers for hobbyists and bedroom programmers just wanting to play around with code and share it. But at the same time, I see that barriers are sorely needed for everyone else.
Hobbyist carpenters also don't have to deal with like 99% of the regulations around buildings.
You can just go make a chair, or a table. Frankly if code is going to be used in a serious large scale project it shouldn't be the realm of hobbyists and if it does somehow end up like that they should be held to same strict code as the professionals.
How about only apply to non-FOSS software? Most hobby projects used not just by the author altend to be FOSS, and businesses can decide to go FOSS, making their software independently auditable by anyone, or go through certification.
I guess there's a danger of a campaign to re-brand FOSS as "uncertified" then...
And why AI companies push back hard on regulations and accountability.
Regulations stifle innovation!
/s
You need to install your own plumbing though because all pipes for the next two years are earmarked for data centers.
Vibe coding is dumb and this is funny but I also feel like it's quite misleading. Plenty of software was messy and full of technical debt long before vibe coding was a thing. And organisations trying to plan software projects in the same rigid way as physical construction has historically been responsible for many of those problems.
Problem is that now creation of this sort of sloppy software is automated and accessible to everyone.
Meh. Joe Schmoe might make a stupid website for himself. Actual software that's made by companies has the same responsibility they always had, they made bad software before - often so bad LLM output is better in comparison.
The first part is new the second part isn't. Sloppy lazy poorly understood amateur code is how everyone starts after all! And to be fair also finishes.
I'd argue the extent of the accessibility is new, though. Yes, everyone can write sloppy code, but you had to RTFM or at least a basic guide to do so. With the whole agentic AI stuff this goes out the window as well.
Gives too much credit.
It would in all likelihood have two exterior doors but neither of them would be at ground level
You give human ingenuity too much credit. AI can code a house plan even better than it can write a resume or draw a Shrimp Jesus. Architects are donezo. Disagree, downvote, scream into the sky. Nonetheless, itβs over.
Well, I'll be avoiding going in any buildings an AI was an architect for, that's for damn sure.
Well from the outside it looks something like a house. Itβs only when you go inside you realize itβs all cardboard toothpicks and super glue holding it up. Thereβs no bathrooms or closets. Just a living room. A single room.
Ooooh.
Now I finally understand where those hotels with glass doors and walls for the toilet are coming from recently!
It has no doors, and that brown thing is just a painting of a door in an otherwise solid wall. The windows, too.
.......at what point am I allowed to just start burning everything to the ground? THIS is the reality I've gotta live through??? Fuck that!!! Fuck AI!!! Fuck "vibes"!!! I just want to be able to eat lettuce without feeling like I'm prepping for a colonoscopy!!!!
Burn it. Burn down society. Burn it all. I will not sit by as our country is presided by a pedophile rapist. Why is ANYONE ok with this???
Burn it down.
Lorax house
This is why real engineers (as opposed to software "engineers") are licensed.
both are real engineers (but no, a simple programmer is not a software engineer), so you can skip the quotes. but yes, CIVIL engineers are licensed, opposed to most other (mechanical, electrical....) engineers
I am someone who has worked professionally as both a civil engineer and a software "engineer." When I put scare quotes around the latter, I mean them.
The difference in rigor, sense of responsibility for the public good, and especially power to push back against harmful ideas by management, is shocking.
DRM, enshittification, dark patterns, Cambridge Analytica, sneaky "telemetry:" none of that shit would be allowed to exist because it would violate professional ethical standards, if software "engineering" were a real profession that had any!
Don't blame the dev for what the system lacks. We took millenia to get here for buildings and had rich people and politicians literally falling through floors drowning in shit before. Software is relatively new and gets extorted for maximum profit while slow-moving projects that try to do everything right get shamed (and usually extorted since doing it right entails Open-Source, which now gets laundered through probability engines). There are effectively no guardrails devs can use to protect something from bad ideas management has, and management is on an AI-induced power trip right now.
In such an environment actual buildings would also be made out of paper and have surveillance cams in the subscription-based toilet. I'd bet someone from a country with a corrupt system and lack of regulation enforcement could tell you tales about it. I think you were just lucky.
The devs are literally to blame. The very lack of professional ethics and responsibility of the devs is the very reason why calling them engineers is a fucking insult to real engineers.