[nmehner]

I guess everyone dealing with legacy software sees code as a cost factor. Being able to delete code is harder, but often more important than writing code.

Owning code requires you to maintain it. Finding out what parts of the code actual implement features and what parts are not needed anymore (or were never needed in the first place) is really hard. Since most of the time the requirements have never been documented and the authors have left or cannot remember. But not understanding what the code does removed all possibility to improve or modify it. This is how software dies.

Churning out code fast is a huge future liability. Management wants solutions fast and doesn't understand these long term costs. It is the same with all code generators: Short term gains, but long term maintainability issues.

[dpark]

Do you not write code? Is your code base frozen, or do you write code for new features and bug fixes?

The fact that AI can churn out code 1000x faster does not mean you should have it churn out 1000x more code. You might have a list of 20 critical features and it have time to implement 10. AI could let you get all 20 but shouldn’t mean you check in code for 1000 features you don’t even need.

[nmehner]

I write code. On a good day perhaps 800-1000 "hand written" lines.

I have never actually thought about how much typing time this actually is. Perhaps an hour? In that case 7/8th of my day are filled with other stuff. Like analysis, planning, gathering requirements, talking to people.

So even if an AI removed almost all the time I spend typing away: This is only a 10% improvement in speed. Even if you ignore that I still have to review the code, understand everything and correct possible problems.

A bigger speedup is only possible if you decide not to understand everything the AI does and just trust it to do the right thing.

[ubercow13]

Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff, it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at least IME.