[Swizec]

> including totally trashing the old implementation and creating an entirely new one from scratch that matches all the requirements

Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?

When your software supports 8, 9, 10 or more zeroes of revenue, "trash the old and create new" are just about the scariest words you can say. There's people relying on this code that you've never even heard of.

Really good post about why AI is a poor fit in software environments where nobody even knows the full requirements: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-telemetry-spec-sur...

[dctoedt]

> Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?

The comment to which you're responding includes a note at the end that the commenter is being sarcastic. Perhaps that wasn't in the comment when you responded to it.

[Swizec]

It wasn’t thanks for highlighting. Can be hard to tell online because there’s a lot of people genuinely suggesting everyone should build their own software on the fly

[rsoto2]

If the amount of code corporations produce goes even 2x there's gonna be a lot of jobs for us to fix every company's JIRA implementation because the c-suite is full of morons.

[person22]

I work on a product that meets your criteria. We can't fix a class of defects because once we ship, customers will depend upon that behavior and changing is very expensive and takes years to deprecate and age out. So we are stuck with what we ship and need to be very careful about what we release.

[fhd2]

That's why I find any effort to create specifications... cute. In brownfield software, more often than not, the code _is_ the specification.

[suzzer99]

But if you start from the beginning with a code base that is always only generated from a spec, presumably as the tools improve you'd be able to grow to a big industrial-grade app that is 100% based on a spec.

The question is how many giant apps out there have yet to be even started vs. how many brownfield apps out there that will outlive all of us.

[fhd2]

If the spec covers 100% of the code paths, then yes, you're right. But now spec and code are entirely redundant. Changing the spec or changing the code takes the same effort.

If the spec doesn't specify all the details, then there are gaps for the code to fill. For example, code for a UI is highly specific, down to the last pixel. A spec might say "a dialog with two buttons, labelled OK and cancel". That dialog would look different every time the spec is reimplemented.

Unless of course, there was also a spec for the dialog, that we could refer to in the other spec? That's really just code and reuse.

[patates]

This might be the "Steve, Don't Eat It!" version of the xkcd workflow comic.

Whatever you ship, steve will eat, and some steves will develop an addiction.

[empath75]

> When your software supports 8, 9, 10 or more zeroes of revenue, "trash the old and create new" are just about the scariest words you can say. There's people relying on this code that you've never even heard of.

Well, now it'll take them 5 minutes to rewrite their code to work around your change.

[Swizec]

> Well, now it'll take them 5 minutes to rewrite their code to work around your change

You misunderstand. It will take them 2 years to retrain 5000 people on the new process across hundreds of locations. In some fields, whole new college-level certifications courses will have to be created.

In my specific experience it’s just a few dozen (maybe 100) people doing the manual process on top of our software and it takes weeks for everyone to get used to any significant change.

We still have people using pages that we deprecated a year ago. Nobody can figure out who they are or what they’re missing on the new pages we built

[loloquwowndueo]

> You misunderstand. It will take them 2 years to retrain 5000 people on the new process across hundreds of locations. In some fields, whole new college-level certifications courses will have to be created.

Replace them by AI.

I’m still being sarcastic.

[dolmen]

Ask AI about a strategy and tools to build to figure out.

[Swizec]

Great now you have a strategy (one less MBA to hire). You still need to do the strategy.

The doing is where most of the time goes. Strategy docs are cheap, my intern can give you 5 of those by tomorrow.

[procaryote]

That will be after it broke, which costs money

Also: no