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AI makes tech debt more expensive

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Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#21

Post by dcchambers »

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…

Like most of us it appears LLMs really only want to work on greenfield projects.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#22

Post by RangerScience »

vander_elst wrote: post #2

"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?

IME, “young” correlates with health b/c less time has been spent making it a mess… but, what’s really going on is the company’s culture and how it relates to quality work, aka, whether engineers are given the time to perform deep maintenance as the iteration concludes.

Maybe… to put it another way, it’s that time spent on quality isn’t time spent on discovery, but it’s only time spent on quality that gets you quality. So while a company is heavily focused on discovery - iteration, p/m fit, engineers figuring it out, etc - it’s not making a good codebase, and if they never carve out time to focus on quality, that won’t change.

That’s not entirely true - IMO, there’s a synergistic, not exclusionary relationship between the two - but it gets the idea across, I think.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#23

Post by dcchambers »

LLM code gen tools are really freaking good...at making the exact same react boilerplate app that everyone else has.

The moment you need to do something novel or complicated they choke up.

This is why I'm not very confident that tools like Vercel's v0 (https://v0.dev/) are useful for more than just playing around. It seems very impressive at first glance - but it's a mile wide and only an inch deep.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#24

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#26

Post by holoduke »

dcchambers wrote: post #23

LLM code gen tools are really freaking good...at making the exact same react boilerplate app that everyone else has. The moment you need to do something novel or complicated they choke up. This is why I'm not very confident that tools like Vercel's v0 ( https://v0.dev/ ) are useful for more than just playing around. It seems very impressive at first glance - but it's a mile wide and only an inch deep.

If can you can create boilerplate code, logging, documentation, common algorithms by AI it saves you a lot of time which you can use on your specialized stuff. I am convinced that you can make yourself x2 by using an AI. Just use it in the proper way.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#28

Post by bob1029 »

> Not only does a complex codebase make it harder for the model to generate a coherent response, it also makes it harder for the developer to formulate a coherent request.

> This experience has lead most developers to “watch and wait” for the tools to improve until they can handle ‘production-level’ complexity in software.

You will be waiting until the heat death of the universe.

If you are unable to articulate the exact nature of your problem, it won't ever matter how powerful the model is. Even a nuclear weapon will fail to have effect on target if you can't approximate its location.

Ideas like dumpstering all of the codebase into a gigantic context window seem insufficient, since the reason you are involved in the first place is because that heap is not doing what the customer wants it to do. It is currently a representation of where you don't want to be.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#29

Post by Clubber »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #8

> However, in ‘high-debt’ environments with subtle control flow, long-range dependencies, and unexpected patterns, they struggle to generate a useful response I'd argue that a lot of this is not "tech debt" but just signs of maturity in a codebase. Real world business requirements don't often map cleanly onto any given pattern. Over time codebases develop these "scars", little patches of weirdness. It's often temptin…

I call them warts, but yes agree, especially an industry that does a lot of changing, for example a heavily regulated one.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#30

Post by Clubber »

rsynnott wrote: post #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…

>I mean, is this worth the effort? Why?

It doesn't matter, it's the new hotness. Look at scrum, how shit it is for software and for devs, yet it's absolutely everywhere.

Remember "move fast and break things?" Everyone started taking that as gospel and writing garbage code. It seems the industry is run by toddlers.

/rant

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