We will get an interesting effect if AI plateaus around where it does now, which is that AI code generation will bring "the long run" right down to "the medium run" if not on to the longer side of the short run. AI can take out technical debt an order of magnitude faster than human developers, easily, and I'm still waiting for it to recognize that an abstraction is necessary and invest into putting on in the code rather than spending the ones already present.
Of course if AI continues to proceed forward and we get to the point where the AIs can do that then they really will be able to craft vast code bases at speeds we could never keep up with on our own. However, I'm not particularly convinced LLMs are going to advance past this particular point, to a large degree because their training data contains so much of this slop approach to coding. Someone's going to have to come up with the next iteration of AI tech, I think.
I wonder about heavy curation of data sets, and then only senior level developers in the Alignment/RLHF phases, such that the expertise of a senior level developer were the training. The psychology of those senior level developers would be interesting, because they would knowingly be putting huge numbers of their peers, globally, out of work. I wonder about if it would, then if course it will, and then I question if we're really that desperate.
debt doesn't harm you until the carrying costs become to high v profits. Just have to hit that point (if is exists, maybe growth accelerates forever if you are optimistic).
If you only knew how the enterprise space does stuff you'd realize how little a priority maintainability is.
I'm grateful we had Java when this stuff was taking off; if any enterprise applications were written in anything else available at the time (like C/C++) we'd all suffer even more memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, and data breaches than we do now.
Now that's interesting, because I come from a world where enterprise level stuff was all done in C/C++ until quite recently, and with the shift to :web technologies" the quality of virtually everything has dropped through the floor, including the knowledge and skill level of the developers working on the tech. It is rare that I see people that have been working in excess of 10 years post graduation, if they went to college. The college grads have been pushed out by lower quality and lower skilled React developers that really do not belong in the industry at all. It's really a crime how low things have gotten, in such a short time: 10 to 15 years ago there were 2-3 decades of experienced people all over the place. Not anymore.
jerf|3 days ago
Of course if AI continues to proceed forward and we get to the point where the AIs can do that then they really will be able to craft vast code bases at speeds we could never keep up with on our own. However, I'm not particularly convinced LLMs are going to advance past this particular point, to a large degree because their training data contains so much of this slop approach to coding. Someone's going to have to come up with the next iteration of AI tech, I think.
bsenftner|3 days ago
inigyou|3 days ago
movedx01|3 days ago
andrei_says_|3 days ago
Nicook|3 days ago
kunai|3 days ago
I'm grateful we had Java when this stuff was taking off; if any enterprise applications were written in anything else available at the time (like C/C++) we'd all suffer even more memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, and data breaches than we do now.
bsenftner|3 days ago