True if you’re using AI the wrong way. AI means dramatically less code, most of which is generated.
Creating react pages is the new COBOL
AI makes tech debt more expensive
161–170 of 254 posts
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#162> 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…
I use ChatGPT the most when I need to make a small change in a language I'm not fluent in, but I have a clear understanding of the project and what I'm trying to do. Example: "write a function that does this and this in Javascript". It's essentially a replacement of stack overflow.
I never use it for something that really requires knowledge of the code base, so the quality of the code base doesn't really matter. Also, I don't think it has ever provided me something I wouldn't have been able to do myself pretty quickly.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#163It's funny that his recommendations - organize code in modules etc. - are nothing AI-specific, it's what you'd do if you had to handover your project to an external team, or simply make it maintainable in the long term. So the best strategy for collaborating with AI turns out to be the same as for collaborating with humans.
I completely agree. That's why my stance is to wait and see, and in the meanwhile get our shit together, as in make our code maintainable by any intelligent being, human or not.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#164> 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…
Ironically enough I’ve always found LLMs work best when I don’t know what I’m doing
I find this perspective both scary and exciting. I'm curious, how do you validate the LLM's output? If you have a way to do this, and it's working. Then that's amazing. If you don't, how are you gauging "work best"?
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#165are LLMs even auditable?
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#166Yeah, this is a total click-bait article. The claim put forth by the title is not at all supported by the article contents, which basically states "old codebases riddled with tech-debt do not benefit very much from GenAI, while newer cleaner codebases will see more benefit." That is so completely far off from "AI will make your tech debt worse."
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was recently assigned to work on a huge legacy ColdFusion backend service. I was very surprised at how useful AI was with code. It was even better, in my experience, than I've seen with python, java, or typescript. The only explanation I can come up with is there is so much legacy ColdFusion code out there that was used to train Copilot and whatever AI jetbrains uses for code completion that this is one of the lang…
But where did these companies get the ColdFusion code for their training data? Since ColdFusion is an old language and used for backend services, how much ColdFusion code is open source and crawlable?
I'm definitely assuming that they don't limit their training data to what is open source and crawlable.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#168On one hand I agree with this conceptually, but on the other hand I've also been able to use AI to rapidly clean up and better structure a bunch of my existing code.
The blind copy-paste has generally been a bad idea though. Still need to read the code spit out, ask for explanations, do some iterating.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#169> There is an emerging belief that AI will make tech debt less relevant. Wow. It's hard to believe that people are earnestly supposing this. From everything we have evidence of so far, AI generated code is destined to be a prolific font of tech debt. It's irregular, inconsistent, highly sensitive to specific prompting and context inputs, and generally produces "make do" code at best. It can be extremely "cheap" vs tr…
The mainstream layman/MBA view is that "AI/nocode will replace the programmers". Most actual programmers know better, of course.
Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive
#170> 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…
> They work best where we need them the least.
Au contraire. I hate writing boilerplate. I hate digging through APIs. I hate typing the same damn thing over and over again.
The easy stuff is mind numbing. The hard stuff is fun.