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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

#91

Post by bthallplz »

p0nce wrote: post #69

In my Dconf'24 talk "Software as investment" I proposed a basic framework based upon a value function (compositional) for each piece of software. This framework doesn't really need an update due to AI, apart from the (unrelated!) cost model being updated depending on how good AI is at maintenance. Apparently it would do 1.7x the number of bugs, but perhaps it fixes them faster too? I don't know. Seeing software as in…

Is this the talk? https://youtu.be/YBZ6JFrfuiM?si=6ZdZph8GxOy-OLHZ I'm curious to see it!

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

#92

Post by hombre_fatal »

gitaarik wrote: post #19

Yeah, but to be honest, I sometimes just tell Claude to cleanup / refactor stuff; it finds a lot of things, discusses it with me and I approve the plan, and it churns away my tokens for some time. I do this once in a while, and I've been doing this for over 6 months and I don't feel like my development has significantly slowed down. Yeah my token usage is more for sure, but my codebase also is, so I'm not worried abo…

Yeah, there's a double-standard I've been seeing in LLM discourse here: LLMs suck but they are also somehow expected to proactively do maintenance sweeps in your code over time and repay technical debt, presumably on your behalf.

If you want to build well-architected, well-tested code or pay back debt, the LLMs make the world your oyster. And it's easier than ever since LLMs have no problem doing ridiculous cross-cutting refactoring that you'd never have done on your own.

That LLMs essentially lead to code that's harder to maintain, or that human-produced code is easier to maintain by default just aren't claims I'd sign off on, and TFA doesn't try to render the argument.

I'd argue the opposite since LLMs make it trivial to plan arch/tests for all the code changes you wouldn't have had the energy to do it for.

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

#93

Post by mandeepj »

p0nce wrote: post #69

In my Dconf'24 talk "Software as investment" I proposed a basic framework based upon a value function (compositional) for each piece of software. This framework doesn't really need an update due to AI, apart from the (unrelated!) cost model being updated depending on how good AI is at maintenance. Apparently it would do 1.7x the number of bugs, but perhaps it fixes them faster too? I don't know. Seeing software as in…

> Seeing software as investment avoids speaking about "technical debt" by speaking about "value"

People already see their efforts as an investment, but that doesn't stop Debt from accruing over time. There will always be parts in your software that could have been written better, and that's Debt.

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

#94

Post by lovich »

ehnto wrote: post #35
tedbradley wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Given that the user between your comment and mine is a 1 day old account that did not address my comment at all and instead hallucinated a response, I assume they are a bot.

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

#95

Post by topherhunt »

I don't buy the math here because it seems to only model half of what AI coding agents do. The entire argument treats AI as a code-generation accelerant -- more output, therefore more maintenance burden, therefore compounding debt. But in my experience (solo dev, ~30k LOC apps), Claude Code has decimated my maintenance costs. I throw broken tests at it. I use it to diagnose bugs, trace data flows, reason through unfamiliar code, and refactor when things get unwieldy. AI isn't just a faster typist -- it's a faster debugger, reader, refactorer. Modeling AI's impact on codebase growth without modeling its impact on maintenance speed seems like a very selective way to model the future. The maintenance cost curves cited here come from pre-AI dev data; using them to predict post-AI outcomes assumes the answer to the most important question (does AI reduce per-line maintenance cost?) rather than investigating it directly. Nobody has nine years of data on this because halfway-decent coding agents have existed for < 6 months. I like the cautionary advice -- watch out for how much maintenance burden you're incurring with all that delicious AI code slop, folks -- but I don't think his confident quantitative predictions ("gains erased after 5 months") are justified. Am I missing something obvious here?

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

#96

Post by richardbarosky »

topherhunt wrote: post #95

I don't buy the math here because it seems to only model half of what AI coding agents do. The entire argument treats AI as a code-generation accelerant -- more output, therefore more maintenance burden, therefore compounding debt. But in my experience (solo dev, ~30k LOC apps), Claude Code has decimated my maintenance costs. I throw broken tests at it. I use it to diagnose bugs, trace data flows, reason through unfa…

Yeah, it seems like the article should have qualified the issue more or been more precise. Instead of "You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs", something like "Your Use of AI Should Reduce Maintenance Costs".

Some of the maintenance costs you mentioned are primarily read-only, slam dunk AI use cases. Input from AI to diagnose bugs, trace data flows, and help with reasoning. Tests are something of a gray area in the sense that they are not read-only but they don't affect the logic of the app itself.

The "write" use cases (you mention refactoring and the author seems to primarily focus on writing code) is where the author's point seems to be primarily aimed at.

Definitely agree on the read-only improvements to maintenance. Those are unquestionable slam dunk, high value improvements.

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

#99

Post by m463 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #57
m463 wrote: post #4

Same with code reviews. I wonder if AI could make code reviews more presentable. for example, with human code reviews, developers learn quickly not to visually change code like reflowing code or comments, changing indent (where the tools can't suppress it), moving functions around or removing lines or other spurious changes. And don't refactor code needlessly. also, could break reviews up into two reviews - functiona…

These are problems with a code review tool. Not a code change problem.

but I've had to review ai code changes that did these kinds of things in a way that confounded the (decent) review tools.

Also killed readability in general to the source files, apart from making sense of the review changees.

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