Comment by daxfohl
25 days ago
Now that it's real, is there a minimum bar of non-AI-generated code that should be required in any production product? Like if 100% of the code is AI generated (or even doom-tabbed) and something goes wrong in prod, (crash, record corruption, data leak, whatever) then what? 99%? 50%? What's the bar where the risk starts outweighing the reward? When do we look around and say "maybe we should start slowing down before we do something that destroys our company"?
Granted it's not a one-size-fits-all problem, but I'm curious if any teams have started setting up additional concrete safeguards or processes to mitigate that specific threat. It feels like a ticking time bomb.
It almost begs the question, what even is the reward? A degradation of your engineering team's engineering fundamentals, in return for...are we actually shipping faster?
obviously you're not a devops eng, I think you're wildly under-estimating how much of business critical code pre-ai is completely orphaned anyway.
the people who wrote it were contractors long gone, or employees that have moved companies/departments/roles, or of projects that were long since wrapped up, or of people who got laid off, or the people who wrote it simply barely understood it in the first place and certainly don't remember what they were thinking back then now.
basically "what moron wrote this insane mess... oh me" is the default state of production code anyway. there's really no quality bar already.
I am a devops engineer and understand your point. But there's a huge difference: legacy code doesn't change. Yeah occasionally something weird will happen and you've got to dig into it, but it's pretty rare, and usually something like an expired certificate, not a logic bug.
What we're entering, if this comes to fruition, is a whole new era where massive amounts of code changes that engineers are vaguely familiar with are going to be deployed at a much faster pace than anything we've ever seen before. That's a whole different ballgame than the management of a few legacy services.
after a decade of follow-the-sun deployments by php contractors from vietnam to costa rica where our only qa was keeping an eye on the 500s graph, ai can't scare me.
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