Business never cared about code debt, LLM helps building features faster into production and from their POV, that's all that matters.

If your engineers are "wasting time" optimizing artisan code whilst the competition has released their next version, they'll be told to use AI.

The other reality is that by the time you figure out the right abstraction, business has already pivoted, or your feature will be rewritten , or dumped all together. Obviously there are niche industries where this is not the case but in majority of companies, the churn is exhausting.

My point is this: we can shout all we want about "maintenance" and "technical debt", but it's guaranteed to fall on deaf ears.

LLM has validate upper management's assumption that engineering is nothing but a cost center.

I think that our industry is fundamentally shifting.

Yeah but look how much there is! Aren’t you impressed?

We still pay our software developers the same amount, but now an AI is the middleman taking more and more money (in the form of tokens) every day. With every new model, more tokens are consumed so the new model can "think" more. Nobody's even really reading or reviewing the code the AI produces, so software quality goes down, and we're paying more to produce it. And when there's a serious problem with the code? No human is going to dig through the mess the AI created - so burn even more tokens/money trying to get the AI to fix it, or just start over from scratch again with the AI, hoping for better results. It's the definition of insanity. I'm looking for a new job, maybe even a new industry, a new career path - after 30 years in this industry, software development is jumping the shark.