[SCdF]

So currently there are people who are buying grey market peptides[1], marked "not for human consumption" and injecting themselves with them based on dubious anecdotes and vibes, to make their skin clearer, build muscle mass, and so on.

Are they are all suddenly turning into zombies? No. Do they have any real idea what that is going to do to their body a few years down the line? Also no. Could it be catastrophic? Maybe!

I think about this when I think about how violently much of the industry has pivoted into AI being the primary generator of code in the last 6ish months. AI is the peptide, your codebase[2] is the body. Literally no one knows how maintainable this approach is, because there simply hasn't been enough time to find out. It could be fine. It could be a complete mess, with your entire engineering team falling asleep at the wheel, lulled into thinking they understand what is being built when they don't, completely impotent to fix or maintain it once the LLM is no longer able to.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr268m5pxro

[2] Well, _their_ codebase. I've stopped doing it with my own personal codebases, unless I genuinely don't care about maintainability or longevity

[jay_kyburz]

I think smart developers will be building isolated modules, so if your AI generated module keeps failing, you can amputate it and make a fresh one.

[bcoughlan]

I've been thinking the same: the smaller the codebase, the better AI performs. So a way to scale AI is to modularize your architecture to maximize the number of leaf nodes in the dependency tree, and split out separate libraries where it makes sense.

It is huge for token usage also, Claude grepping the codebase for context it doesn't have is the main consumer of input tokens from what I can see.

[jappgar]

Where do you find the smart developers in 2026. Half are rage quitting and the other half have full-blown psychosis.

[sph]

The whole AI powered utopia is a bet on two possible outcomes:

- humans and companies somehow stop being greedy, selfish and cutting corners to optimize for revenue and time-to-market

- LLMs are the path to artificial superintelligences that will be able to deal with the exponential increase in tech debt from throwing AI slop at the wall (vibecoding) because no one has time to do things “the proper way”

The former is impossible. The latter is extremely unlikely and an existential threat to humanity.

The so called Luddites are the only ones to have even engaged at all with these concerns. Everybody else is just focused on the selfish game (see bet #1) of staying afloat in a rapidly changing ecosystem.

[threatofrain]

And interactive feedback rather than having to specify everything up-front.