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AI makes tech debt more expensive

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Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#181

Post by whazor »

inSenCite wrote: post #168

On 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.

Imagine a single file full of complicated logic, where messing with one if statement might cause serious bugs. Here an AI will likely struggle, whereas a human could spend a couple of hours trying to work out the connections.

But if you have a code base with predictable software architectural patterns, the AI will likely recognise and help with all the boilerplate.

Of course there is a lot of middle ground between bad and good.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#182

Post by sfpotter »

Haven't read the article, don't need to read the article: this is so, SO, so painfully obvious! If someone needs this spelled out for them they shouldn't be making technical decisions of any kind. Sad that this needs to be said.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#183

Post by perrygeo »

zer8k wrote: post #125
perrygeo wrote: post #6

> 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…

> the model chokes, starts hallucinating, and makes your job considerably harder. Coincidentally this also happens with developers in unfamiliar territory.

I often think of LLMs as a really smart junior developer - full of answers, half correct, with zero wisdom but 100% confidence

I'd like to think most developers know how to say "I don't know, let's do some research" but in reality, many probably just take a similar approach to the LLM - feign competence and just hack out whatever is needed for today's goal, don't worry about tomorrow.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#184

Post by vitiral »

browningstreet wrote: post #37

I keep waiting for the pairing of coding LLMs with a programming language created specifically to be coupled with a coding LLM.

Ever heard of LISP?

http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp.html

> This paper concentrates on the development of the basic ideas of LISP... when the programming language was implemented and applied to problems of artificial intelligence.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#185

Post by Groxx »

stahorn wrote: post #126
RangerScience wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thought they could cut corners to speed up iteration Anecdotally, I find you can get about 3 days of speed from cutting corners - after that, as you say, you get slowed down more than you got sped up. First day, you get massive speed from going haphazard; second day, you're running out of corners to cut, and on the third day you start running into problems you created for yourself on the first day.

A piece of advice I heard many years ago was to not be afraid to throw away code. I've actually used that advice from time to time. It's not really a waste of time to do a `git reset --hard master` if you wrote shit code, but while writing it, you figured out how you should have written the code.

Very much yes.

There's little reason to try to go straight for the final product when you don't know exactly how to get there, and that's frequently the case. Build toys to learn what you need efficiently, toss them, and then build the real thing. Trying to shoot for the final product while also changing direction multiple times along the way tends to create code with multiple conflicting goals subtly encoded in it, and it'll just confuse you and others later.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#186

Post by valenterry »

skydhash wrote: post #177
slt2021 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am proponent of Clean and Simple architecture that follows standard patterns. because they are easier to maintain, there should be no clever tricks or arch. all software arch should be boring and simple, with as few tricks as possible, unless it is absolutely warranted

Simplicity is hard. And difficulty is what almost everyone using LLMs is trying to avoid. More code breed complexity. I read somewhere that 1/6 of the time should be allocated to refactoring (every 6th cycle). I wonder how that should be done with LLMs.

Exactly that. LLMs generate a lot of simple and dumb code fast. Then you need to refactor it and you can't because LLMs are still very bad at that. They can only refactor locally with a very limited scope, not globally.

Good luck to anyone having to maintain legacy LLM-generated codebases in the future, I won't.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#188

Post by valenterry »

perrygeo wrote: post #58
RangerScience wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

True, if you're using LLMs as a completion engine or to generate scaffolding it's still very useful! But we have to acknowledge that's by far the easiest part of programming. IDEs and deterministic dev tools have done that (very well) for decades. The LLM gains are in efficiency for rote tasks, not solving the other hard problems that make up 98% of the day. The idea that LLMs are going to advance software in any sub…

> The idea that LLMs are going to advance software in any substantial way seems implausible to me

I disagree. They won't do that for existing developers. But they will make it so that tech-savy people will be able to do much more. And they might even make it so that one-off customization per person will become feasable.

Imagine you want to sort hackernews comments by number of character inline in your browser. Tell the AI to add this feature and maybe it will work (just for you). That's some ways I can see substantial changes happen in the future.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#189

Post by eru »

cpeterso wrote: post #98
randomdata wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is the reverse: That ColdFusion training sources are limited, so it is more likely to converge on a homogenization? While, causally, we usually think of a programming language as being one thing, but in reality a programming language generally only specifies a syntax. All of the other features of a language emerge from the people using them. And because of that, two different people can end up speaking two…

I wonder what a language designed as a target for LLM-generated code would look like? What semantics and syntax would help the LLM generate code that is more likely to be correct and maintainable by humans?

Perhaps something like Cobol? (Shudder.)

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#190

Post by physicles »

inSenCite wrote: post #168

On 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.

Do you mind getting into specifics about how you've been using AI to restructure your code? What tools are you using, and how large is the code base you're working with?
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