This strategy will seem to work really well until the economy that enabled that foundation to form is hollowed out. Then, there will be a reckoning (but we will have no choice but to march forth from there).
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but my brain cannot comprehend how machines can advance such interconnected systems while keeping humans in focus.
Perhaps I shouldn't have watched the Animatrix again.
If you haven't seen it, I think you would appreciate the film Margin Call.
There will only be a reckoning if models don't get much better.
If they do get much better you can just have them refactor, fix bugs in, or replace the existing codebase.
The concept of tech debt is sort of meaningless if you anticipate intelligence gains in models to continue.
In software + GenAI now every housewife can build some App over evening.
Especially as teams invest in proper agentic harnessing.
We have had a champion in our team that has invested a lot of time into it over the last 4 months, and if anything, quality has improved, not decreased. Architecture is more coherent, codebase has been cleaned up, agents find information quickly, code produced is very solid and my role is more and more checking that the output meets the requirements. But I cannot confidently say that I would've done a better job than AI more often than not I have to admit it does a better job than mine.
The mistakes are less and less technical and merely in the domain mapping. And AI is still not creative as I am for finding solutions quickly to unlock stakeholders' issues. Also, AI is still not creative as I am for finding the proper solutions for advanced technical problems. But it does a better job than me, even on that front, one shotting few solutions in a fraction of a time it would've taken me to test one idea myself.
Mind you, I don't like AI and I think it ruined the job, I don't like working this way, it's exhausting, way more work on one side, way less fun and fiddling with technical parts.
And yet, I have the genuine belief that few years from now we'll be cloning open source repositories that are already optimized/harnessed and tested for agentic loops and best practices left and right with software engineers mostly overseeing the domain translation and putting their 2 cents on the non-boilerplatey parts of the product (which, in general, are a small part of the surface).
I think that the next years of my career will be mostly spent in setting up and writing the harnessing and domain mapping part. Then I will move to another sector, not because I necessarily believe I won't have a job, but because I want to vomit thinking that's going to be my job.
"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."
As long as you've indicated what you want, the machine will try to do what you ask of it. It won't get tired because "the codebase is too big", or it has gotten bored of the pattern, or it wants to introduce a new technology.
It just does the thing you asked of it. (note, that yes, I get that as a codebase size increases, it might make it more difficult to fit into context, but that only applies if it needs to read a large percentage of the project to implement the task, which shouldn't be the case.
there are good actors, which are empowered by AI to produce positive impact, but often there are N times more bad actors, which push crappy code to close feature requests fast, increase performance LoC-like metrics, etc.
> No one cares anymore.
I never cared about this.
I think this captures something that I've been searching for the words for. (Maybe I should have gotten an LLM to write the words for me.) Some of the biggest AI boosters are the kind of dev that would have cared about the new frameworks of the last 3 months. They had a "the framework does all the thinking for me" attitude already, so it is easy for AI to slot into that.
If you extract the spec from first implementation and reimplement from scratch you get a free testing oracle. Where they diverge you send the agent to decide which one had a bug.
It's going to skip the code entirely for small businesses and just render UIs straight from context data and prompts at interactive speeds. Kind of like Google's Genie does with games but much more accurately.
it needs to win marketing landscape, hyper-overcrowded by thousands of competitors, slop-gened over weekend.
I have a more hopeful take. As AIs improve and get faster we can more quickly and iteratively improve code which we may have historically avoided due to the work involved.
I know i've made several refactors that would have otherwise been insane lifts. Not only because the work involved but because sometimes you don't know if it will work, and so you have a sort of double friction; you don't know if it will even succeed. With an AI you can just throw it at the refactor to see if it runs into a problem all while you're having a coffee break or w/e.
In general AI is going to enable humanity to be more extreme versions of itself. For good and bad. I suspect more bad than good, though.