This seems like a support issue, not an AI issue. AI is how the code was written, but the issue would be the same if it was amateurs writing bad code. If all you want to do is support your API, a support article outlining the issues you see over and over would be something to point your customers to. Warrant your API against errors, but point out that anything more is billable work. If you're not interested, partner with someone to do that work. You could even offer support contracts that include some amount of customization.
This post seems to be saying that AI opened up a new avenue for people to demand free work.
If someone asked "I wrote some rough designs and interfaces, can you write me an app for free?" The author could easily detect it as a request for free work. But because the first part is hidden behind some ChatGPT generated code and the second part is disguised as a request for help, the author would be tricked into doing this free work, until they detected this pattern and write a blog post about it.
That's like saying "seems like the problem is the internet is filled with low quality content" in response to ai bots when, while not wrong, the new problem is that we've created a way to accelerate the creation of that low quality content many orders of magnitude faster.
So what was a difficult problem can quickly become insurmountable.
It's a support issue in a sense, but in many contexts people want to offer a better support experience than "anything more is billable work". A reputation for being helpful and customer-friendly is valuable, especially in a business where you're selling to other programmers, and you can't buy that reputation after the fact with money from support contracts.
in volume, this turns into support writing the code.
I think of how the south park movie folks sent so much questionable content to the censors that the compromise in the end let through lots of the puppet sex.
The difference is scale. I don't know how many times people need to say this, but LLM tools enable people to spam low quality code at a rate that is far faster than ever.
There's been multiple stories and posts here on HN about issues with AI generated PRs for open source repos because of people using them to game numbers or clout. This is a similar problem where you have a bunch of people using your API and then effectively trying to use you for free engineering work.
Totally agree the difference is in the scaling properties.
On the other hand, I look around the room I am in and it is filled mostly with "low quality" Chinese made products. While you can't compare these products to expensive, expertly crafted, high end products, there is another scaling law at play when it comes to price. The low quality Chinese products are so cheap that I don't even consider the more expensive options. When the low quality desk lamp is close enough and 20x cheaper than the well made desk lamp, there is no decision point for me.
