[s1mplicissimus]

I agree with the premise and the conclusion, but over almost 20 years of writing, adapting and delivering software I've more than once been in exactly the same situation. Noone to ask, the only person even vaguely familiar with software development left half a year ago. Half of the processes have changed since the software was written, and the people who owned them have left, too. So while I agree that LLMs will accelerate this process, in my opinion it's not a new flavor, just more of an existing problem. Glad to see this kind of thinking though.

[trod1234]

The author though neglects what a bus factor of 0 means in real terms and how it gets there, aside from the description of the definition upfront where all knowledge lost.

A company acceptable with a bus factor of zero is a company that is not willing to pay the economic advantage to the expertise required to do the work.

The economic demand, of humanity competing with AI is zero because AI does things its good at with an order of magnitude difference in cost, and the deception and lies surrounding the marketing coupled with communications channel jamming lead to predictable outcomes. What happens when that demand and thus economic benefit go to zero? Any investment in the knowledge in the first place has no return. No one goes into it, no one learns, and that's quite dangerous in economies based in money-printing.

So while there may not be a problem right now, there will no doubt be problems in the next proverbial quarter. Career development pipelines are years in the making. They are sequential pipelines. Zero into a sequential pipeline is zero out with the time-lag between the two (which is years).

~2 years without economic incentive is when you lose your best and brightest. From there is a slow march to a 10 year deadline after which catastrophic losses occur.

I had a chance to have a interesting discussion with a local community college Dean. Apparently they have had to lower the number of Computer Science related program sections because of lack of demand. In intro courses, for 18 sections there were 13 people who had declared for the major, most students when asked citing AI concerns and lack of career development pipeline.

What happens when you have no expertise that you can pay at any price to fix the processes involved because you put them all out of business using what amounts to a semi-thinking non-sentient slave.

Without supply, there can be no demand. Where supply becomes infinite because of external parties, there can be no demand. There can be need, but demand is not need.

So this all started in 2022. Best and brightest are re-skilling. There's a glut of lower competency talent too. Bad things happen when you mess with the foundations of economics, and they happen on a time lag, where you can't react fast enough after-the-fact.

What will it take? At some point there will be a crisis where they will have to treat it as triage on the battlefield. The people in charge didn't want to hear about this when it could have made a difference.

[fragmede]

As programmers, the bus factor is something to be noted and avoided, but in medicine, it goes the other direction. Private practice is one doctor, and a whole support staff for that single individual. Why are we so eager to be replaceable?

[robertlagrant]

Doctors keep patient notes, and EHRs and patients can recall histories separately to that doctor. Doctors also go through relatively standardised training. That single individual is important, but it's not the same.

What's more the same would be if they were practicing healthcare on a species that they had invented, and no one knew anything about it, and the species was crucial to a company's survival.

[fragmede]

Doctor Smith's ENT doctor's office has a bus factor of one. If doctor Smith dies, that company goes under. Their patients are going to have to find a new ENT doctor. There's a life long relationship people have with their doctors. If that doctor retires, it's a big deal to all of their patients who now have to find a new doctor. ENTs are fairly standardized, thankfully, so their patients can just go elsewhere if there's a bus event, but doctor smith is crucial to the company's survival. The continuity of business plan there is patients can find another ENT doctors and the employees can go to another practice.

Aka, why we should ask vendors for their source code in case they go under.