[Traubenfuchs]

This person has never worked with several decades old government, bank or tax (return) code where all that's ever done is edge cases and implementations of new laws and capabilities being forever bolted on to each other. Systems that were half migrated from a PL/I / Cobol mess to java 7 by Accenture, until the money ran out with the result being that both systems now exist forever and have to be integrated into each other for years. In the end you have decades old code bases maintained by people with less than 10 years of total work tenure, who will leave for greener pastures soon. No one to ask but some old grumpy grey beard with a royal salary who barely does any work but has some ancient wisdom to share.

No one understanding what's going on inside of complex systems in financially constrained environments built and maintained by average, at best, engineers is the norm and is what keeps the world running.

None of that is a symptom of AI. The only change AI brings is that even first person developers don't know anymore what the fuck they just deployed.

[kennethops]

Cries in defense contractor nosies. (I have)

I wanted to touch on this point but then this post started getting WAY too long.

>the only change AI brings is that even first person developers don't know anymore what the fuck they just deployed.

This to me is going to make your first point 100x worse in every damn way

[terseus]

AI may not be the source of the problem but can make it a hundred times worse.

[simgt]

I agree with all of this, but that's assuming we've reached a plateau. Maybe Claude 6.3 will be able to churn through 10M lines of Java and Cobol, tidy it and convert it to Rust. Or maybe not, but so far the scaling laws are holding.

[Traubenfuchs]

Oh I am sure with the right prompts and the right chunking and subagents this is already possible today. But converting the old cobol mess to java code that is "most likely doing the same things" is just a fraction of the work.

You need to run those systems in parallel, integrate them in each other or have an abstraction/two-rails layer in front of them, test, test, test and test again, all of which takes months, while new features now need to be added to both systems, whether by AI or some average developer schmuck!

Do you have any idea how much any of this costs? Mind boggling amounts of money. Infrastructure costs will at least DOUBLE for several MONTHS. Meanwhile you will need extra manpower and AI credits for MONTHS on top of your increased existing costs for maintenance and new features.

Welcome to a new hell! LLM can't solve this!

[simgt]

You don't need to convince me that this is hell, in particular with all the managers who have never written a single line of code being now convinced that programming is completely solved.