[WorldMaker]

I've had it stuck in my head for months now that "LLMs are Legacy Code as a Service". A lot of what they ~~plagiarize~~ produce is based on other people's legacy code. A lot of vibe coding is producing "Day 0 Legacy Code" that is hard to debug/maintain in a lot of the exact same ways Legacy Code always is. (It was written by a developer who is not currently around. It's probably poorly commented/documented in the hows/whys rather than the whats. If it was fast tracked into production somewhere it is probably already in a "not broke, don't fix it" state where the bugs are as much a part of the expected behavior as the features.)

As a developer that has spent far too much of my career maintaining or upgrading companies' legacy code, my biggest fear with the LLM mania is not that my skills go away, but become in so much higher demand in an uncomfortable way because the turn around time between launch and legacy code becomes much shorter and the management that understands why it is "legacy code"/"tech debt" shrinks because it is neither old or in obviously dead technologies. "Can you fix this legacy application? It was launched two days ago and nobody knows what it does. Management says they need it fixed yesterday, but there's no budget for this. Good luck."