51–60 of 126 posts
The bet that he misses, which a lot of companies are starting to make or at least think about, is that AI will get better at coding. So the model / harness / whatever is next takes care of the maintenance burden. That's the theory anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a boring fucking future.
No kidding. AI does all the interesting problem solving and humans... Write tests. The most boring activity on the planet
There is problem solving in coding, but the bigger problems exist at a higher level and that’s still on you to solve.
Also I’ve been messing with “ai-only” files recently. You make a markdown file that basically tells it what the file does, how it’s used, and point to an API contract in some other file. Then you can run async ai that will try things and only submit a PR of all the tests pass and the perf improves. The files become almost unreadable to be, but I decided to embrace it because they were already unreadable. But so is the output of, say, the protobuf code generator and I never had a problem accepting that
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a boring fucking future.
No kidding. AI does all the interesting problem solving and humans... Write tests. The most boring activity on the planet
Probably more boring still, though.
- productivity isn't the be-all end-all, it's just one metric and a consultant's mantra. taking a productivity hit can be more than fine if it gives you a tactical/strategic advantage or opportunity.
- i'm not convinced at all that agents will become prohibitively expensive. that's indeed some companies' wet dream but a) good cheap competition is emerging and b) you don't really need the latest models or massive computing power to get shit done.
i do agree though with the emphasis on code quality and debt, and for not blindly going for the silver bullet fad and throwing money at it like there's no tomorrow in the hopes of some "productivity figures boost". then again i doubt that companies going for that would heed such advice, we've been there many times.
In my experience AI reduces maintenance costs. Though, context might matter here, I'm working on a multi decade set of projects, while there is a lot of greenfield feature development, the old code / older projects have suddenly become a lot easier to work with, modernize, and in a bunch of cases, eliminated. Dependency on old libraries, build tools, in some cases updated, in other cases just eliminated, builds are f…
Same with code reviews. I wonder if AI could make code reviews more presentable. for example, with human code reviews, developers learn quickly not to visually change code like reflowing code or comments, changing indent (where the tools can't suppress it), moving functions around or removing lines or other spurious changes. And don't refactor code needlessly. also, could break reviews up into two reviews - functiona…
In my experience AI reduces maintenance costs. Though, context might matter here, I'm working on a multi decade set of projects, while there is a lot of greenfield feature development, the old code / older projects have suddenly become a lot easier to work with, modernize, and in a bunch of cases, eliminated. Dependency on old libraries, build tools, in some cases updated, in other cases just eliminated, builds are f…
I agree - AI makes it easier to wrangle legacy code. I think the author's point is that if you lose access to the AI tools, everything becomes more daunting -- because you've been comfortably moving mountains with heavy equipment, and now it's back to hand tools.
In my experience AI reduces maintenance costs. Though, context might matter here, I'm working on a multi decade set of projects, while there is a lot of greenfield feature development, the old code / older projects have suddenly become a lot easier to work with, modernize, and in a bunch of cases, eliminated. Dependency on old libraries, build tools, in some cases updated, in other cases just eliminated, builds are f…
This rings true for me too, but I don't think it counts if your just using AI to aid maintenance. The basic argument in the article is around how many hours of maintenance you have to do for each hour of "value-add" feature development. So A. your only measuring maintenance costs not the ratio and B. The "old code" whp wasn't written with AI in the first place.
Two things I'd add 1. software doesn't only have tech maintenance - there is also user support and it increases as software grows. 2. I'm not convinced maintenance costs scale linearly. And even if it scales linearly, you will eventually get to a point where maintenance takes up all your time.