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by sharadov 50 days ago
Tech debt and maintainability were important because time was of the essence in another era. If the cycles get compressed by say 95%, to hell with it, just trash the old and write everything from scratch, start from a clean slate each time?
3 comments

That may be good enough for consumer facing systems. Rewrites seldom go well for enterprise systems of record because the code embodies a lot of undocumented but critical requirements. If you start vibe coding from a clean slate then all of that knowledge is lost and you've created an even bigger problem.
I don't think that needs to be true either anymore. Exhaustive specifications and comprehensive test suites are easily created now too. That's why I think software engineering will not go away, it will just change drastically.
It will change and most likely for worse. The new applications will be even buggier and worse than what we have now.
And worst possible outcome for the working class of humans is that we end up with AIs as our managers, being told to do what the AI recommends no matter what, or being in some way suborned to the AI.
That's what I'm expecting will happen, yes. My point further is that I believe it's a road to nowhere. It will be costly in time and money, and result in people involved not knowing what's going on in the project more than ever. The last point going unnoticed by the management of course, as they rarely know the project to begin with anyway.
So fix a system's known bugs by creating an entirely new system with a fresh set of unknown bugs?