Comment by andersmurphy
13 hours ago
Wonder if the real value of LLMs/AI is similar to microservices in that it solves an organisational/culture problem.
In this case AI allowed the developer to make a change that the organisation would not have allowed. Regular rewrites don't let you signal to investors that you are AI ready/ascendant/agentic (whatever the latest AI hype term is) so would have been blocked. But, an AI rewrite.
If the only thing LLMs did was clear enterprise technical debt backlogs, the end consumer would still benefit from the technology.
That assumes they don't accelerate the accumulation of technical debt. For each item cleared how many new ones are added. LLMs accelerate your good engineers and your bad ones. So the slop likely increase faster than it can be cleared.
And it will affect good engineers and turn them into worse engineers too
AI benefits rely on these good engineers having 5, 10, 20 years of experience pre-AI designing (and fully, thoroughly understanding) these systems. What's going to happen to that engineering skill after 15 years of AI use?