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An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

jamesshore.com

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Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#31

Post by yurishimo »

joshka wrote: post #20

I feel like AI might let us model some of the things that we initially didn't scope that led to these problems (e.g. "Decided not to fix every bug, or upgrade every dependency") - being able to more easily ask a system that can dig into "how much time are we spending on stuff related to foo" AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't m…

> AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't make decisions that have these same tail effort profiles. That can be things like building out tooling to handle maintenance updates

This has been possible already but from my vantage point, it doesn't look like anyone really did it? Sure, there already exists tons of OSS that is built for this case, even before AI, yet it seems to me to always come back to incentives. IMO, there is no incentive to write maintainable software (and I'm not sure there ever will be one at this pace). Businesses are only incentivized to write enough software to accomplish the task within their own defined SLAs and nothing further. But even that doesn't seem to be a blocker at this point if Github is used as an example.

Good software comes from people who care deeply about solving the problems in way that they are invested in. If your employees don't care about your product, you're already starting on the wrong foot. AI isn't going to incentivize bad-average developers to write better software or a good developer to push back harder against their clueless manager. When they make the decision, AI might help (assuming it doesn't make a bigger mess) but it's not going to reduce technical debt in any meaningful way without a sea change of perspective from product managers around the world.

So far, I just don't see it happening in theory or in practice. I hope I'm proven wrong!

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#32

Post by philipp-gayret »

Would be an interesting concept and read were it grounded in reality. Unfortunately, it's data and graphs pulled out of someone's imagination. Reality is nowadays with the right skillset you can take state of the art AI tools and get a complete language rewrite and or refactor and be done the same afternoon.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#33

Post by pdhborges »

philipp-gayret wrote: post #32

Would be an interesting concept and read were it grounded in reality. Unfortunately, it's data and graphs pulled out of someone's imagination. Reality is nowadays with the right skillset you can take state of the art AI tools and get a complete language rewrite and or refactor and be done the same afternoon.

At least if you a test suite that doesn't have to be migrated. I too would like to migrate some services from Python to Rust but my test suite is written in Python so I would have to actually check if the test suite migration was correct manually (I can't event compile it!) before doing the rewrite.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#34

Post by esailija »

hamhamed wrote: post #16

This is what I've been preaching to my team. With 5.5 and 4.7 the coding agents are good enough know to almost never take any tech debt. Any new feature or fixes should come with a cleanup or refactor, on the same PR.

That's better than 99.99999% humans. Where do I put my credit card details?

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#35

Post by ehnto »

tedbradley wrote: post #29
lovich wrote: post #15

So what are all of these agentic based strategies going to do once the infinite money spigot of investment into AI ends and they need to start charging prices that actually make a profit? I get that most of the cost is in training and not inference, but I don’t see how models stay useful once the worlds software updates in a few months post training since the models can’t learn without said training. Are we just goin…

Glad you asked. AI empowers people who couldn't do a job before to do a job. With more supply of qualified workers, these workers compete with each other by lowering the salary they'll take. So: * You get paid less. * The company might pay a similar amount due to LLM costs. Although, it could be more or less as well, depending on how it works out. A couple of years ago, I saw a story of a guy writing two articles for…

That is one possibility (that is playing out). Another one worth contrasting is the idea of AI as leverage for the worker. If you can take a regular developer and augment their output by 25%, then they have become more valuable to you and you should pay them more. Why should you pay them more? Because the market rate will price in that they provide more value now and you'll lose those workers to competitors if you don't.

That's a pretty old economic idea, and it will be interesting to see if it holds up in this instance. I have no idea how this all plays out. I do think it won't be one size fits all though.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#36

Post by dirkc »

Two things I'd add

1. software doesn't only have tech maintenance - there is also user support and it increases as software grows.

2. I'm not convinced maintenance costs scale linearly. And even if it scales linearly, you will eventually get to a point where maintenance takes up all your time.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#38

Post by joshka »

yurishimo wrote: post #31
joshka wrote: post #20

I feel like AI might let us model some of the things that we initially didn't scope that led to these problems (e.g. "Decided not to fix every bug, or upgrade every dependency") - being able to more easily ask a system that can dig into "how much time are we spending on stuff related to foo" AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't m…

> AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't make decisions that have these same tail effort profiles. That can be things like building out tooling to handle maintenance updates This has been possible already but from my vantage point, it doesn't look like anyone really did it? Sure, there already exists tons of OSS that is built for t…

I think I have a different perspective on this because I've worked in places that do care about that sort of thing on tools that do focus on those sorts of things. I think the long term incentive for these tools to address tech debt as a goal comes from the AI eval benchmarks trending towards being saturated. The advantages of one tool over another will be in the longer context things. This naturally will tend to start to act as a forcing function for training to focus on the longer tail of software development. A good way of thinking about this is GPT 3.5 was good at dealing well with lines of code and functions, 4 was functions, small apps, 5 seems adept at delivering apps and systems, 6 will be systems and whole enterprised programs of work.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#39

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

aetherspawn wrote: post #9

I think AI is great for the soul destroying boring stuff that makes me want to quit my job like wrapping legacy code in test cases. Hey I’ll take on any idiot who’s willing to do that job, even if he’s artificial.

You can only type at 50WPM and read one file at a time, the LLM doesn't have the physical limits, use it at your advantage so you can actually focus on the work that matter

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#40

Post by Jenk »

richardbarosky wrote: post #7

Insightful. Agree with this take. Unfortunately, maintainability is simply bucketed as a "non-functional" requirement. Maintainability (and similar NFRs) should actually be considered what preserves and enables the delivery of future functional requirements -- in contrast to framing non-functional requirements as simply "how" the software must do what it does vs. the "what"/functional requirements that "actually matt…

I've found the first, and most important, step for any team or organisation to eliminate concerns with NFRs, "tech debt", and whatever else it may be called, is to stop giving it a name.

I'm being completely serious. By giving it some kind of distinct name, you are giving license to it being ring-fenced and de-prioritised by someone who doesn't (but, arguably, probably should) know better.

Quality matters. It hits your P&L very quickly and very hard if you don't maintain it. So it is as important as any other factor.

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