Is this based on a study or something? I just see a graph with no references. What am I missing here?
AI makes tech debt more expensive
131–140 of 254 posts
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#132I cannot wait for the inevitable top-down backlash banning any use of AI tools.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#133I love the way our SWE jobs are evolving. AI eating the simple stuff, generating more code but with harder to detect bugs... I'm serious, it feels that we can move faster with these tools but perhaps have to operate differently.
We are a long ways from automating our jobs away, instead our expertise evolves.
I suspect doctors go through a similar evolution as surgical methods are updated.
I would love to read or participate in the discussion of how to be strategic in this new world. Specifically, how to best utilize code generating tools as a SWE. I suppose I can wait a couple of years for new school SWEs to teach me, unless anyone is aware of content on this?
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#134I find AI most helpful with very specific, narrow commands (add a new variable to the logger, which means typescript and a bunch of other things need to be updated) and it can go off and do that. While it's doing that I'll be thinking about the next thing to be fixed already. Asking it for higher level planning / architecture is just asking for pain
Current gen AI is bad at high level planning. But I've found it useful in iterating on my ideas, sort of a rubberduck++. It helps to have a system prompt that is not overly agreeable
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#135Don't make me tap the sign.
"GARBAGE IN -- GARBAGE OUT!!"
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#136AI 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
Yeah the article is just another borderline-useless self-promotion piece.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#137> 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…
as the context windows get larger and the UX for analyzing multiple files gets better, I’ve found them to be pretty good
But they still fail at devops because so many config scripts are at never versions than the training set
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#138> 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…
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Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The niche I've found for LLMs is for implementing individual functions and unit tests. I'll define an interface and a return (or a test name and expectation) and say "this is what I want this to do", and let the LLM take the first crack at it. Limiting the bounds of the problem to be solved does a pretty good job of at least scaffolding something out that I can then take to completion. I almost never end up taking th…
Can't tell you how much I love it for testing, it's basically the only thing I use it for. I now have a test suite that can rebuild my entire app from the ground up locally, and works in the cloud as well. It's a huge motivator actually to write a piece of code with the reward being the ability to send it to the LLM to create some tests and then seeing a nice stream of green checkmarks.
> I now have a test suite that can rebuild my entire app from the ground up
What does this mean?
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#140Today's job is finishing up and testing some rather gnarly haproxy configuration.
There's already a fairly high chance I'm going to stuff something up with it. There is no chance that I'm giving some other entity that chance as well.