[iamflimflam1]

Very much like humans when they drown in technical debt. I think the idea that a messy codebase can be magically fixed is laughable.

What I might believe though is that agents might make rewrites a lot more easy.

“Now we know what we were trying to build - let’s do it properly this time!”

[Cthulhu_]

Potentially, yes, but as with other software, you need to know AND have (automated) verifications on what it does, exactly.

And of course, make the case that it actually needs a rewrite, instead of maintenance. See also second-system effect.

[ben_w]

> Potentially, yes, but as with other software, you need to know AND have (automated) verifications on what it does, exactly.

Yes, but even here one needs some oversight.

My experiments with Codex (on Extra High, even) was that a non-zero percentage of the "tests" involved opening the source code (not running it, opening it) and regexing for a bunch of substrings.

[tonyedgecombe]

>And of course, make the case that it actually needs a rewrite, instead of maintenance.

"The AI said so ..."

[tripledry]

I'm wondering how much value there is in a rewrite once you factor in that no one understands the new implementation as well as the old one.

Not only is it difficult to verify, but also the knowledge your team had of your messy codebase is now mostly gone. I would argue there is value in knowing your codebase and that you can't have the same level of understanding with AI generated code vs yours.

[pphysch]

The point of a rewrite is to safely delete most of that arcane knowledge required to operate the old system, by reducing the operational complexity of it.

[Ntrails]

> “Now we know what we were trying to build - let’s do it properly this time!”

I wonder if AI will avoid the inevitable pitfalls their human predecessors make in thinking "if I could just rewrite from scratch I'd make a much better version" (only to make a new set of poorly understood trade offs until the real world highlights them aggressively)

[j16sdiz]

It will make rewrite quicker, not "easier".

When the management recognize a tech debt, often it is too late that nobody understand the full requirement or know how things are supposed to work.

The AI agent will just make the same mistake human would make -- writing some half ass code that almost work but missing all sorts of edge case.

[bluGill]

I was involved in a big re-write years ago. The boss finally put the old product on his desk with a sign "[boss's name]'s product owner" - that is when people asked how should this work the most common answer was exactly like the old version. 10 years latter the rewrite is a success, but it cost over a billion dollars. I have long suspected that billion dollars could have been better spend by just fixing technical debt.

[eloisant]

That's correct, the more I work with AI the more it's obvious that all the good practice for humans is also beneficial for AI.

More modular code, strong typing, good documentation... Humans are bad at keeping too much in the short-term memory, and AI is even worse with their limited context window.