AI 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 ...
AI makes tech debt more expensive
11–20 of 254 posts
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#12I asked the AI to write me some code to get a list of all the objects in an S3 bucket. It returned some code that worked, it would no doubt be approved by most developers. But on further inspection I noticed that it would cause a bug if the bucket had more than 1000 objects because S3 only delivers 1000 max objects per request, and the API is paged, and the AI had no ability to understand this. So the AI's code would be buggy should the bucket contain more than 1000 objects, which is really, really easy to do with an S3 bucket.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#13"Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases" I thought that at the beginning the code might be a bit messy because there is the need to iterate fast and quality comes with time, what's the experience of the crowd on this?
I don't think there's such a thing as a single metric for quality - the code should do what is required at the time and scale. At the early stages, you can get away with inefficient things that are faster to develop and iterate on, then when you get to the scale where you have thousands of customers and find that your problem is data throughput or whatever, and not speed of iteration, you can break that apart and mak…
This!
Active tradeoff analysis and a structure that allows for honest reflection on current needs is the holy grail.
Choices are rarely about what is best and are rather about finding the least worst option.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#14Bah 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.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#15I agree with a lot of the assertions made in TFA but not so much the conclusion. AI increasing the velocity of simpler code doesn’t make tech debt more expensive, it just means it won’t benefit as much / be made cheaper.
OTOH if devs are getting the simpler stuff done faster maybe they have more time to work on debt.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#16> Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases benefit the most from generative AI tools, while companies with gnarly, legacy codebases will struggle to adopt them. In other words, the penalty for having a ‘high-debt’ codebase is now larger than ever. This mirrors my experience using LLMs on personal projects. They can provide good advice only to the extent that your project stays within the bounds of well…
Eh, it’s been kinda nice to just hit tab-to-complete on things like formulaic (but comprehensive) test suites, etc.
I never wanted the LLM to take over the (fun) part - thinking through the hard/unusual parts of the problem - but you’re also not wrong that they’re needed the least for the boilerplate. It’s still nice :)
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#17"Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases" I thought that at the beginning the code might be a bit messy because there is the need to iterate fast and quality comes with time, what's the experience of the crowd on this?
I find messiness often comes from capturing every possible edge case that a young codebase probably doesn’t do tbh.
A user deleted their account and there’s now a request to register that account with that username? We didn’t think of that (concerns from ux on imposter and abuse to be handled). Better code in a catch and handle this. Do this 100x times and you code has 100x custom branching logic that potentially interacts n^2 ways since each exceptional event could probably occur in conjunction with other exceptional events.
It’s why I caution strongly against rewrites. It’s easy to look at code and say it’s too complex for what it does but is the complexity actually needless? Can you think of a way to refactor the complexity out? If so do that refactor if not a rewrite won't solve it.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#18> Instead of trying to force genAI tools to tackle thorny issues in legacy codebases, human experts should do the work of refactoring legacy code until genAI can operate on it smoothly. When direct refactoring is still too risky, teams can adjust their development strategy with approaches like strangler fig to build greenfield modules which can benefit immediately from genAI tooling.
Or, y'know, just not bother with any of this bullshit. "We must rewrite everything so that CoPilot will sometimes give correct answers!" I mean, is this worth the effort? Why? This seems bonkers, on the face of it.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#19"Companies with relatively young, high-quality codebases" I thought that at the beginning the code might be a bit messy because there is the need to iterate fast and quality comes with time, what's the experience of the crowd on this?
A startup with talent theoretically follows that pattern. If you're not a startup, you don't need to go fast in the beginning. If you don't have talent in both your dev team and your management, the codebase will get worse over time. Every company can differ on those two variables, and their codebases will reflect that. Probably most companies are large and talent-starved, so they go slow, start out with good code, then get bad over time.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#20... until it won't. A mature code-base also has (or should have) strong test coverage, both in unit-testing and comprehensive integration testing. With proper ci/cd pipelines, you can have a small team update and upgrade stuff at a fraction of the usual cost (see amazon going from old java to newer versions) and "pay off" some of that debt.
The tooling for this will only improve.