Furthermore, I predict they will identify massive structural issues, propose huge lifts to redo it correctly, and will instead be told to do patchwork fixes to stop the bleeding.
Now, I do think AI is (or will be) good enough to implement these patchwork fixes when given explicit instructions, but someone will need to figure it out for them.
The problem is if you don’t understand the root cause, you’ll at best feed the LLM a list of symptoms, and it will dutifully fix them. “Our p99 on this endpoint is breaching” becomes “I’ve added an index for this query,” or “I’ve added a caching layer,” when the actual problem may well be that you’re storing huge blobs that bloat your working set, cause buffer pool churn, and saturate your NIC. Is the symptom solved? Yes. Is it scalable? No, you’ll next need to vertically scale the instance, which is more expensive, and has an upper bound. Eventually you’ll decide to shard, which adds complexity, when the actual solution would’ve eliminated all of those issues at once.