Evergreen: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Machine learning is the high interest credit card of technical debt.
AI makes tech debt more expensive
41–50 of 254 posts
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#42Speaking personally, I've found this tech much more helpful in existing codebases than new ones.
Missing test? Great, I'll get help identifying what the code should be doing, then use AI to write a boatload of tests in service towards those goals. Then I'll use it to help refactor some of the code.
But unlike the article, this requires actively engaging with the tool rather than, as they say a "sit and wait" (i.e., lazy) approach to developing.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#43> However, in ‘high-debt’ environments with subtle control flow, long-range dependencies, and unexpected patterns, they struggle to generate a useful response I'd argue that a lot of this is not "tech debt" but just signs of maturity in a codebase. Real world business requirements don't often map cleanly onto any given pattern. Over time codebases develop these "scars", little patches of weirdness. It's often temptin…
Louder for the people in the back. I've had this notion for quite a long time that "tech debt" is just another way to say "this code does things in ways I don't like". This is so well said, thank you!
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#44Bah this article is a bunch of nonsense. You're saying that a technology that has been around for a grand 2 years is not yet mature? Color me shocked. I'm sure nothing will change in the future either.
According to Ilya Sutskever: "results from scaling up pre-training have plateaued".
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...
They're trying other techniques to improve what we already have atm.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#45I keep waiting for the pairing of coding LLMs with a programming language created specifically to be coupled with a coding LLM.
The problem is less the language and more what is written with any given language
The world is complex and we have to write a lot of code to capture that complexity. LLMs are good at the first 20% but balk at the 80% effort to match reality
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#46> However, in ‘high-debt’ environments with subtle control flow, long-range dependencies, and unexpected patterns, they struggle to generate a useful response I'd argue that a lot of this is not "tech debt" but just signs of maturity in a codebase. Real world business requirements don't often map cleanly onto any given pattern. Over time codebases develop these "scars", little patches of weirdness. It's often temptin…
I recently watched a team speedrun this phenomenon in rather dramatic fashion. They released a ground-up rewrite of an existing service to much fanfare, talking about how much simpler it was than the old version. Only to spend the next year systematically restoring most of those pieces of complexity as whoever was on pager duty that week got to experience a high-pressure object lesson in why some design quirk of the…
Hahaha, Joel Spolsky predicted exactly that IN THE YEAR 2000:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like most of us it appears LLMs really only want to work on greenfield projects.
Good joke, but the reality is they falter even more on truly greenfield projects. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42134602
That is because, by definition, their models are based upon the past. And woe unto thee if that training data was not pristine. Error propagation is a feature; it's a part of the design, unless one is suuuuper careful. As some have said, "Fools rush in."
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like most of us it appears LLMs really only want to work on greenfield projects.
Good joke, but the reality is they falter even more on truly greenfield projects. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42134602
I agree with this. But the reason is that AI does better the more constrained it is, and existing codebases come with constraints.
That said, if you are using Gen AI without a advanced rag system feeding it lots of constraints and patterns/templates I wish you luck.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#49AI has a different "tech debt" issue. Because with AI you can turn any problem into a black box. You build a model, and call it "solved". But then reality hits ...
This was what I thought the post would talk about before clicking through. AI adds tech debt because none of the people maintaining or operating the code wrote the code and are no longer familiar with their own implementation
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#50Code is not really lossy zipped text.