> But once you start storing data there, you can't just remove them. You have to come up with a migration plan, make sure you don't disrupt the system because people are paying to use this every day. You have to think about what you'll do if the migration fails. Make sure you don't end up with orphaned foreign keys. It's just so much harder to fix. Even with the best model you can get.
Migration plan? Just ask Claude when shit hits the fan. You'll make a plan when you need one.
> By the time you've untangled one bad decision, five more have been merged.
I'm slowly (partially ironically/sardonically/nihilistically) adopting a mindset of accelerationism towards the collapse of software development - it was largely done wrong from day 1 and wasn't "real engineering" to a sufficient degree to not lead to the mess that we've been in maybe for the past 20-40 years. The only thing AI did was take away the brakes and press down on the accelerator, we're already headed towards a cliff and have been for a long time.
If the code in airplanes and spaceships was developed with the same degree of care and attention as "good code", you'd see those dropping out of the sky regularly. If they built bridges like we build software, they'd fall apart regularly as well. Good code CANNOT hinge on the opinions of some senior dev, or even a group of them - it must be provably good. And if it must be provable, then these checks must be automatable. Bad code (whatever that means, however you'd manage to classify the difference between AI slop and what you want to see) should be IMPOSSIBLE to get into the system at all, due to those automated checks.
Be it good enough test coverage, automated checks for usability and end to end coverage of the features, project/domain specific lists of architectural rules (think ArchUnit), needing proofs not just tests etc. We will never have that - our OSes are bad, our browsers and other essential software is bad, our programming languages are bad (the fact that unchecked exceptions even exist in languages is a cardinal sin), same for databases and tbh any other class of software you can look at.
This impassioned comment might border on a rant, but my argument is that the past decades aren't the baseline of good code, we'd probably need to spend 10-100x more effort to produce 100-10x less code, but make the existing code bulletproof - there is no reason for more than one OS to exist, no reason for more than one UI framework to exist (or even all of the egregious ways how the web platform was transformed from documents and links to a collection of badly written apps, which eventually infected the desktop with Electron, due to the native GUI development also being severely neglected), no reason for more than one web framework to exist or even more than one programming language to exist in mainstream usage outside of research and looking for the solution to use for the next decade/century of software development. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but the correct answer is probably closer to 1 than to 1000.
Obviously that'd lead to death by comittee and some degree of experimentation is necessary, so hey we end up with a new slopped together library every week and I know nothing and nothing works anyways. I wonder if we had ONE high level programming language, whether over time it would have evolved from C++ to Rust (sans odd parallelism), and if it was based on formal proofs, then migrating between language features could have also been fully automated, alongside enough pushback to any feature deemed not worth it. On the other hand, even with all of the world's developers concentrating effort, something like that might be above our cognitive abilities, so probably not - just too hard to reason abuot.