[phamilton]

The cost of restructuring has also gone down.

The cost of shoring up behavior with tests ahead of a restructure has gone down because of AI.

The cost of implementing a zero downtime migration has gone down because of AI.

A big part of the rust hype has been the low cost of restructuring within an application, even before AI. And now even more so.

The opportunity cost of not being able to safely restructure has gone up substantially.

This is the number one thing I optimize for now: the ability to quickly and safely change significant parts of the code and product.

[cassianoleal]

> This is the number one thing I optimize for now: the ability to quickly and safely change significant parts of the code and product.

This was always a good thing. Its value has nothing to do with the advent of AI coding.

> The opportunity cost of not being able to safely restructure has gone up substantially.

This bit is contradictory with everything else you said. Prior to AI coding it would take a lot longer to perform restructures. If anything, the thing you're now optimising for has gone down in value. It's still valuable, but perhaps a little less.

[mohamedkoubaa]

Ironically, AI assisted/generated code is not trending in the direction of the ability to safely and quickly change. Especially when piloted poorly

[phamilton]

I'm not talking about time. I'm talking about safety. The amount of times I've seen "I refactored it, but I'm not confident enough to take it to prod" is significant. Being able to go faster but still not ship it is the huge opportunity cost.

[cassianoleal]

Time, safety and cost are one and the same. Not safe enough? Spend more time increasing confidence. Taking too long? Cheap out now and pay the price later due to added risk.

All of that is orthogonal to AI. All AI did was accelerate the typing code part - which was never the bottleneck or a very significant cost to begin with.

[sublinear]

In the broader corporate world, that's not "opportunity cost". All changes are considered "risk".

All deployments must be approved by an advisory board. All work must originate from a clear business need. Analysis of those needs is not concerned with implementation, least of which whether "AI" is used.

What matters far more is that a contract requires work to be done by a deadline. Those deadlines are driven by policy. There will be no adjustment to policy unless tangible benefits are shown from more frequent deployments of code.

I gotta tell you that's extremely unlikely if you're already shipping every other week at the end of the sprint. Most of that sprint is spent in meetings, not writing code. Nobody is doing big refactors because it wasn't built so fast to require them. There's some technical debt, but nothing so severe. Those meetings are preventing risk, not wasting time. The bottleneck is a feature, not a bug.

If you think the future of dev work is to be a bureaucrat, you're right! It looks like the rest of the world outside of SV is ahead of the curve and living in the future.

[phamilton]

That's not at all what I meant.

I mean "We can't build X because our code structure makes that difficult" has an opportunity cost of the value of X.

I don't think the future of dev work is being a bureaucrat. I've done more rigorous engineering the last two years than I did previously. I'm more confident in the things I shop and they were built in a fraction of the time. It's a bright future for software engineering.

[rednb]

> the ability to quickly and safely change significant parts of the code and product.

Hum, this reminds me something... "O: open to extension, closed to modifications". Old things are new again.

From context efficiency with approaches such ad DDD and clean architectures, all the way to items such as this one, AI is not creating new tradeoff, it just acts as a multiplier, multiplying productivity for teams doing things right, and multiplying debt for teams having a low quality bar as far as design and architecture are concerned.

[samrus]

Your increasing thrash betting that AI will fix it for you. The only thing your getting in return is not having to think that hard.

It doesnt cost that much time or effort to think hard, so you will be outcompeted by people levergaing AI as much as you, but thinking enough to not have it be thrashing around