Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?
If AI creates a mess, why won’t future AI be able to continue building a mess on top?
And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI coding, but it often seems to me that people are making fundamental errors when framing the problem.
“But how will humans maintain AI code?” Is one such example. Why would we expect one part (code creation) to change dramatically without all other parts equally undergoing a revolution?
> If AI creates a mess, why won’t future AI be able to continue building a mess on top?
Because due to how complexity works, you reach a state where the expected number of breakages from modifying the code base exceeds the value from the change itself. Even if you assume the cost of labor is 0. It’s like the monkeys writing Shakespeare.
> And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.
If this worked it would have been done every few years at big companies. In reality, prototypes cannot take the place of a legacy system because it’s deeply integrated and depended upon. Most notably through the data it owns, but in many subtle ways as well. Simply verifying that a new system will not break is a massive undertaking. Writing meaningfully testable systems is an order of magnitude harder than implementing them.
When there’s a monetary risk of bugs (lose data, lose users, mess up core business logic etc) companies pay for the confidence to get things right. Doesn’t mean it always works, or that their priorities are right, but a payment vendor is not going to trust vibes to do a db migration.
There are still many experimental prototype domains out there, like indie games and static web sites, where throw away and start over is pretty much fine. But that’s not the entire field.
Yeah I was thinking there's gonna be a lot of work for us in a couple years when AI makes a giant mess and corporations come crawling back to us with their tails between their legs. Now I really need to jumpstart repurposing 90s.dev to become essentially a community of the people you're describing. What would we need to start with? Mailing list? bboard? [edit] posted a top level comment with this question
No, IMO, the whole tech industry is cooked. AI is pitched as the next big thing (tm) that will delivery hyper-growth again, and when LLM-based AI doesn't live up to the insane claims being made, the bubble popping will take out players up and down the value chain, investment in tech overall will get massively pulled back, and the job market will get flooded by layoffs.
This will require companies to be able to survive for some time using the old code and to recognise the importance of cleaning up.
Has this ever happened besides the Y2K fixes?
Wouldn't it be much more likely that the companies will simply go under? Or that they will make a team that writes a completely new version of the code, somewhat like Mac OS X was a replacement of MacOS 9 and not a cleanup.
Yeah, it happened at the end of the last outsourcing boom. It's often a very quiet transformation though - a tacit recognition that a fashion failed doesn't get the same PR as "groundbreaking new business fad" because to do so too explicitly would humiliate all of the executives who were the driving force the original fashion.
Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.
Publications like the Economist or the WSJ that drive a lot of this hype among the investor and executive classes are loath to point out that their readers and owners are the proverbial emperor not wearing any clothes.
One of the benefits of tech unions (if they existed in any meaningful way) would be to point out where the emperor is naked in a way that is a bit harder to ignore than the kerfuffle that occurs inside hacker news threads or subreddits dedicated to experienced devs.
