| I agree with most of the article, right up to the point where the assumption is that AI will make things worse. We have reached a point of complexity and short-termism where it's standard practice to shove a huge, barely tested mass of Python, JavaScript, shell scripts, and who knows what else inside a docker container and call it done. Complete with hundreds or thousands of intractable dependencies, many of which we know ~nothing about and thousands of lines of esoteric configurations for servers we have barely any hope of even getting to run optimally, let alone securely. Most software has been awful for a while. Already, with AI: - We can build everything in a statically typed, analysable, and memory safe language like Rust[0], even bits that really have to interact with the shell or wider OS and would previously have been shell scripts - We can insist on positively deranged amounts of testing, at every level - We can easily cut the number of dependencies in our code by >50%, in many cases more like 90% - We can do the refactor as soon as it becomes obvious that it would be a good idea - We can implement quality of life admin and monitoring features that would otherwise sit on the backlog for eternity - We can educate ourselves about what we've built[1] by asking questions about our codebase, build tools to understand the behaviour of our systems, etc. So yes, I agree that "The Future Belongs to Whoever Understands What They Shipped", but unlike the author I am somewhat optimistic[2]. There is more opportunity than ever to build and understand extremely high quality software that does not accept technical debt, corner cutting to meet deadlines, or poor quality (in design or implementation), for those that engineers who are knowledgeable enough and willing to embrace the new tools. And AI, and the tooling around it, is only getting better. [0] or Go or even TypeScript, but there's precious little reason not to pick Rust for most use cases now [1] of course we need to choose to, and many won't… [2] of course, there'll also be near-infinite valueless slop and some people will get sucked into that, but this seems little different to regurgitated SEO spam, short form video, and all the non-AI enshittification we already put up with, and perhaps AI will help more of us do a better job of avoiding it |