[still_grokking]

> I'm told that Google has internal AI dev tools now that generate more code than humans.

Given that code is not an asset but a heavy liability the elephant in the room is the question: Who is going to maintain all that huge piles of generated code?

Wake me up when there's an AI that can safely delete code… That would be a really disrupting achievement!

[sangnoir]

> Wake me up when there's an AI that can safely delete code… That would be a really disrupting achievement!

Big tech already has depandabot-like bots doing this: dead code removal, refactoring and other things a linter can warn you about all get turned into automated pull requests (or PR comments). These are things a linter would tell you - if you had the patience to wait several hours to lint a gigantic monorepo; there probably will be more tooling support based on LLM trained on the huge code bases.

[still_grokking]

I'm not talking about dead-code elimination (that's something that compiles do since decades, without AI), and not about something like Scalafix's automatic refactorings (which are actually deterministic and correct, because it doesn't use AI), but about some true AI that could simplify code—and remove in that process at least 80% of it, because that's usually just crap that piled up over time.

Like said: Wake me up when when you can show me metrics where the use of AI shrunk code-bases by significant large amounts. For example going from 500 kLOC to 100 kLOC, or something like that. (Of course without loosing functionality; and at the same time making the code-base easier to understand). That would be success.

Everything that goes in the opposite direction is imho just leading inevitably to doom.