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AI makes tech debt more expensive

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466 points 0x63_Problems | 4 comments | 14 Nov 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.843s | source
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perrygeo ◴[14 Nov 24 16:50 UTC] No.42138092[source]▶
> 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-known patterns. As soon as your codebase gets a little bit "weird" (ie trying to do anything novel and interesting), the model chokes, starts hallucinating, and makes your job considerably harder.

Put another way, LLMs make the easy stuff easier, but royally screws up the hard stuff. The gap does appear to be widening, not shrinking. They work best where we need them the least.

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1. RangerScience ◴[14 Nov 24 17:03 UTC] No.42138267[source]▶
Eh, it’s been kinda nice to just hit tab-to-complete on things like formulaic (but comprehensive) test suites, etc.

I never wanted the LLM to take over the (fun) part - thinking through the hard/unusual parts of the problem - but you’re also not wrong that they’re needed the least for the boilerplate. It’s still nice :)

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2. hyccupi ◴[14 Nov 24 17:18 UTC] No.42138489[source]▶
> It’s still nice :)

This is the thing about the kind of free advertising so many on this site provide for these llm corpos.

I’ve seen so many comparisons between “ai” and “stack overflow” that mirror this sentiment of “it’s still nice :)”.

Who’s laying off and replacing thousands of working staff for “still nice :)” or because of “stack overflow”?

Who’s hiring former alphabet agency heads to their board for “still nice :)”?

Who’s forcing these services into everything for “still nice :)”?

Who’s raising billions for “still nice :)”?

So while developers argue tooth and nail for these tools that they seemingly think everyone only sees through their personal lens of a “still nice :)” developer tool, the companies are leveraging that effort to oversell their product beyond the scope of “still nice :)”.

3. perrygeo ◴[14 Nov 24 17:36 UTC] No.42138729[source]▶
True, if you're using LLMs as a completion engine or to generate scaffolding it's still very useful! But we have to acknowledge that's by far the easiest part of programming. IDEs and deterministic dev tools have done that (very well) for decades.

The LLM gains are in efficiency for rote tasks, not solving the other hard problems that make up 98% of the day. The idea that LLMs are going to advance software in any substantial way seems implausible to me - It's an efficiency tool in the same category as other IDE features, an autocomplete search engine on steroids, not even remotely approaching AGI (yet).

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4. valenterry ◴[15 Nov 24 01:24 UTC] No.42143100[source]▶
> The idea that LLMs are going to advance software in any substantial way seems implausible to me

I disagree. They won't do that for existing developers. But they will make it so that tech-savy people will be able to do much more. And they might even make it so that one-off customization per person will become feasable.

Imagine you want to sort hackernews comments by number of character inline in your browser. Tell the AI to add this feature and maybe it will work (just for you). That's some ways I can see substantial changes happen in the future.