Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
stevekrouse.com
Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#2[flagged]
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#3From "code" to "no-code" to "vibe coding" and back to "code".
What you are seeing here is that many are attempting to take shortcuts to building production-grade maintainable software with AI and now realizing that they have built their software on terrible architecture only to throw it away, rewriting it with now no-one truly understanding the code or can explain it.
We have a term for that already and it is called "comprehension debt". [0]
With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done.
This is exactly happening to engineers at AWS with Kiro causing outages [1] and now requiring engineers to manually review AI changes [2] (which slows them down even with AI).
[0] https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cl...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f77...
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#4My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work.
I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#5[dead]
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#6From "code" to "no-code" to "vibe coding" and back to "code". What you are seeing here is that many are attempting to take shortcuts to building production-grade maintainable software with AI and now realizing that they have built their software on terrible architecture only to throw it away, rewriting it with now no-one truly understanding the code or can explain it. We have a term for that already and it is called…
> With the rise of over-reliance of agents, you will see "engineers" unable to explain technical decisions and will admit to having zero knowledge of what the agent has done.
I've had to work on multiple legacy systems like this where the original devs are long gone, there's no documentation, and everyone at the company admits it's complete mess. They send you off with a sympathetic, "Good luck, just do the best you can!"
I call it "throwing dye in the water." It's the opposite of fun programming.
On the other hand, it often takes creativity and general cleverness to get the app to do what you want with minimally-invasive code changes. So it should be the hardest for AI.
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#7Every few years something is going to kill code and here we are.
The job changes, it does not disappear.
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#8> If you know of any other snippet of code that can master all that complexity as beautifully, I'd love to see it.
Electric Clojure: https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#9Every few years something is going to kill code and here we are. The job changes, it does not disappear.
For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.
Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
#10My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.
> I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.
You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage of the industry walked away from shift-left greatly more capable than the rest, a larger chunk left the industry entirely, and some people never changed. The same thing will likely happen here. We'll learn a lot of lessons, the Overton window will shift, the world will be different, and it will move on. We'll have new problems and topics to deal with as AI and how to use it shifts away from being a primary topic.