[monkeydust]

One of the things I have started to realize whilst building apps using AI is that you get a bit indulgent when it comes to features. So in my toy project I wanted all sorts of quality of life bells-and-whistles. If this were a proper enterprise application there would have a been a review and priortization process where the merits would be weighted against the cost. In this case the cost is tokens, so fraction of FTE cost. So I just type and it builds. Whilst this is satisfying I am getting the unnerving sense its not going to be good for me (or the toy app) in the long run.

[linkjuice4all]

Other comments have mentioned upstream delays in deciding what features to build now that teams can deliver faster - but you bring up another issue around downstream “understanding debt”. How can sales and marketing sell this stuff if they don’t even know what everything does? How does customer service support it? Sure you can just slop-together documentation, blogs, etc but what good are all these extra features if end-users don’t know or just don’t care about them?

[monkeydust]

Prioritisation due to cost of engineering forces you to think hard about what to build (and thus not to build). If that calculation has now radically changed, which it has, then that presents a whole new risk that has not been thought about extensivley yet but I suspect will be. It might be that customers can develop the thing they want (that say not other customer does) themselves through well defined interfaces but then who supports and maintains that code?