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An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

jamesshore.com

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Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#71

Post by comboy »

momentmaker wrote: post #55

I feel like the exponential growth of the models will make this a non-issue in the future. So the tweaks we might make right now might not be even more with when even more powerful models in the future come.

Yes and no. Imagine some super intelligence tackling the unmaintainable mess. It can untangle it, but the problem is that unless you have a test suite that's covering 100% of possible cases (which should on it's own enough to build the codebase), you will stumble upon "what's actually the intent here" problem. Some other software depending on buggy behavior on this one etc.

Which is why I think additional intent preserving abstraction is where software coding agents are likely heading.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#72

Post by cgaooo »

richardbarosky wrote: post #7

Insightful. Agree with this take. Unfortunately, maintainability is simply bucketed as a "non-functional" requirement. Maintainability (and similar NFRs) should actually be considered what preserves and enables the delivery of future functional requirements -- in contrast to framing non-functional requirements as simply "how" the software must do what it does vs. the "what"/functional requirements that "actually matt…

The maintenance cost argument cuts both ways. We ran into this building our own project AI moves fast, but the bugs it introduces are weirdly hard to spot. Not the obvious stuff. The logic that looks completely reasonable until three weeks later, when something breaks in production, and you trace it back to a subtlety the AI got wrong. My honest take: AI doesn't reduce maintenance costs, it shifts them. Less time writing, more time reviewing. And reviewing AI code is harder than reviewing human code because it's fluent and confident even when it's wrong. Whether that's a net win depends entirely on how good your team is at reading code vs writing it

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#73

Post by aprilthird2021 »

keithnz wrote: post #6

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 have a very very opposite experience in a large company where everyone shits code all over parts of the codebase they don't understand with AI assistance.

We have had outages increase in tandem with lines of code shipped and outages are getting more and more severe. Yes we have improved much old code, deleted more old code, can automate code modernization, can better diagnose issues, have more options for mitigations, etc.

But all that has not offset the sheer magnitude of code being shipped which no one really understood.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#74

Post by skydhash »

KaseKun wrote: post #67
jwpapi wrote: post #62

I really like this question: If you could wish for a codebase, which codebase would you wish for? If you think a second on that question, you’ll realize you probably not wishing for a super feature-rich one, but an easy to understand one, quite close to what you have now. One that is easily to maintain and extend, depending on the upcoming business challenges.

Code doesn't exist in a vacuum though. Code bases that you "work in" (maintain, etc) solve real world problems, and solving those problems should trump cleanliness every time Codebases that are clean are typically showcase examples that sit on a shelf to be admired and appreciated.

> Code bases that you "work in" (maintain, etc) solve real world problems, and solving those problems should trump cleanliness every time

Only if you value your time more than the users’ time and your fellow developer time. Code are run and read more than they are written. You may need to do some hacky coding, but they should be small in scope, surrounded by warning, and have a ticket filed for properly resolving the issue. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#75

Post by [deleted] »

KaseKun wrote: post #67
jwpapi wrote: post #62

I really like this question: If you could wish for a codebase, which codebase would you wish for? If you think a second on that question, you’ll realize you probably not wishing for a super feature-rich one, but an easy to understand one, quite close to what you have now. One that is easily to maintain and extend, depending on the upcoming business challenges.

Code doesn't exist in a vacuum though. Code bases that you "work in" (maintain, etc) solve real world problems, and solving those problems should trump cleanliness every time Codebases that are clean are typically showcase examples that sit on a shelf to be admired and appreciated.

[deleted]

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#76

Post by saulpw »

esailija wrote: post #34
hamhamed wrote: post #16

This is what I've been preaching to my team. With 5.5 and 4.7 the coding agents are good enough know to almost never take any tech debt. Any new feature or fixes should come with a cleanup or refactor, on the same PR.

That's better than 99.99999% humans. Where do I put my credit card details?

I agree it's rare, but I think there are more than 830 humans on the planet which can do this.

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#77

Post by stevepotter »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #70
stevepotter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t talking about unit tests. Was talking about tests that accelerate development, where you can setup everything and test a feature by just pressing enter vs clicking around or whatever. The tests are how you build features, so I don’t consider that boring 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” f…

I'm aware that I'm probably an outlier, but implementing the solution is the actual rewarding part for me AI does nothing for me there. Coming up with the hypothetical solution and having AI build it does nothing for me I like to build

I also love to build. And I'm mourning the loss of coding as a craft that is sought after and well compensated. I like to get my hands dirty and it feels wrong that I can basically write specs and the real labor that I love is done for me. But it also allows me to build some pretty amazing stuff that I would have never been able to do otherwise. So I'm slowly accepting it and want to come up with ways to coexist. I code for several hours a day because and will continue to do so because even after 36 years I still get joy and comfort from it

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#79

Post by stevepotter »

afro88 wrote: post #44

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.

Be careful there. The whole "just wait 6 months" thing is problematic. It gives you an excuse to make a mess now, because "in 6 months" AI will magically fix it.

It also belittles the human resources. "I heard that 6 months AI will do everything, so why would I hire new engineers or promote the ones we have?"

Re: An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

#80

Post by kristianc »

This hasn't been my experience. I'm finding that I'm spending less time on maintenance precisely because it's less tedious to maintain as I go now, and because the "make a small change across 400 files" type thing which would have seemed impossible before can be chewed through by an agent in a couple of hours.
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