I read a post on LinkedIn this week that went, roughly, like this. The level of quality in software has never been as low as it is right now. We as quality professionals have been fighting for years to raise it, and now everyone is chasing speed, more lines of code faster, everything is broken, and nobody seems to care. Someone replied underneath, in the way only LinkedIn replies do: nobody cared about quality before AI either, so why did you expect that to change now?

The back-and-forth that followed went in the usual direction. Someone mentioned professional software craftsmen who did care before and still do. Someone else brought up the analogy that AI is a second industrial revolution. The frame kept coming back to craftsmanship on one side and slop on the other, with the industrial revolution doing real work in the middle, as if the lesson of that period were obvious and on the side of the craftsmen.