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AI makes tech debt more expensive

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Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#61

Post by dartos »

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…

Imo real tech debt is when the separation between business logic and implementation details get blurry.

Rewrites tend to focus all in on implementation.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#62

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

bunderbunder wrote: post #33
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 recently watched a team speedrun this phenomenon in rather dramatic fashion. They released a ground-up rewrite of an existing service to much fanfare, talking about how much simpler it was than the old version. Only to spend the next year systematically restoring most of those pieces of complexity as whoever was on pager duty that week got to experience a high-pressure object lesson in why some design quirk of the…

> Only to spend the next year systematically restoring most of those pieces of complexity as whoever was on pager duty that week got to experience a high-pressure object lesson in why some design quirk of the original existed in the first place.

Just to emphasize the point: even if it's not obvious why there is a line of code, it should at least be obvious that the line of code does something. It's important to find out what that something is and remember it for a refactor. At the very least, the knowledge could help you figure out a bug a day or two before you decide to pore over every line in the diff.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#63

Post by svaha1728 »

eesmith wrote: post #3

> human experts should do the work of refactoring legacy code until genAI can operate on it smoothly How does one determine if that's even possible, much less estimate the work involved to get there? After all, 'subtle control flow, long-range dependencies, and unexpected patterns' do not always indicate tech-debt.

As long as you can constrain your solution to the logic contained inside a Todo app, all is golden /s

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#64

Post by benatkin »

The author starts with a straw man argument, of someone who thinks that AI is great at dealing with technical debt. He makes little attempt to steel man their argument. Then the author argues the opposite without much supporting evidence. I think the author is right that some people were quick to assume that AI is much better for brownfield projects, but I think the author was also quick to assume the opposite.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#65

Post by swatcoder »

> 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 traditional contributions, but gets to where it's going by the shortest path rather than the most forward-looking or comprehensive.

And so it does indeed work best with young projects where the prevailing tech debt load remains low enough that the project can absorb large additions of new debt and incoherence, but that's not to the advantage of young projects. It's setting those projects up to be young and debt-swamped much sooner than they would otherwise be.

If mature projects can't use generative AI as extensively, that's going to be to their advantage, not their detriment -- at least in terms of tech debt. They'll be forced to continue plodding along at their lumbering pace while competitors bloom and burst in cycles of rapid initial development followed by premature seizure/collapse.

And to be clear: AI generated code can have real value, but the framing of this article is bonkers.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#66

Post by Terr_ »

endemic wrote: post #34
holoduke wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like we should get rid of the boilerplate, rather than have an LLM barf it out.

Yeah, I often like to point out that our entire industry is already built on taking repeatable stuff and then abstracting it away.

Boilerplate code exists when the next step is often to start customizing it in a unique and unpredictable way.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#67

Post by shmoogy »

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.

Most people don't do novel things, and those that do still have like 90% same business logic somebody else has done a million times over.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#68

Post by jamil7 »

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…

> 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-known patterns.

I agree but I find its still a great productivity boost for certain tasks, cutting through the hype and figuring out tasks that are well suited to these tools and prompting optimially has taken me a long time.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#69

Post by morkalork »

nimish wrote: post #41

Evergreen: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Machine learning is the high interest credit card of technical debt.

This is funny in the context of seeing GCP try to deprecate a text embedded api and then push out the deadline by 6 months.

Re: AI makes tech debt more expensive

#70

Post by luckydata »

elforce002 wrote: post #44
luckydata wrote: post #14

Bah this article is a bunch of nonsense. You're saying that a technology that has been around for a grand 2 years is not yet mature? Color me shocked. I'm sure nothing will change in the future either.

According to Ilya Sutskever: "results from scaling up pre-training have plateaued". https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o... They're trying other techniques to improve what we already have atm.

and we plow through plateaus every 6 months, regularly, by inventing something new. I thought we were engineers, not some kind of amish cult.
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