Comment by leoc
11 hours ago
> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable.
Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)
Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.
How do you explain to a junior this pile of messy code isn’t crap but is actually years of integrated knowledge ? That the most common principles discussed in computer science (OOP, SOLID, DRY etc.) are actually just little guides that aren’t to be taken to the extremes ?
Here's a 26-year old post on the exact topic of messiness you raise:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
A decade ago, I was sitting in on a meeting about a rewrite and, before I could say anything, someone in the first year of her career asked why anyone thought a rewrite would be any cleaner once all the edge cases were handled. Afterwards, I asked her where she learned this. She said "I don't know, it just seems kind of obvious." She went on to be a great engineer and is now a great manager.
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It's a dice roll to keep the junior around until he unlearns the wrong bits.
Expert knows when to break the rules
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tell them they need to turn a profit as quickly as possible
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> Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully.
Do they??
Yeah... in my experience people who code like that 'successfully' make modifications that fix an immediate problem while kicking another bug or two further down the road in a never-ending sunk-cost-fallacy of job security...
I believe this type of person exists.
My team lead has worked on the same software for 30 years. He has the ability to hear me discuss a bug I noticed, and then pinpoint not only the likely culprit, but the exact function that's causing it.
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Yes.
There is a lot of absurdly complex software that runs with high reliability. We hear a lot about the ones that don’t.
This is sadly so true.
I have really tried as an "old" person in the field to try and pass on the stuff I've learned, but "craft" and such really has absolutely no home in modern dev culture. The people who care about history, the craft, etc. are increasingly rare.
Executive leadership bias older not younger, no?
No.
Younger implies cheaper.
it's been 10y and i still haven't seen a human system that bad
maybe some that people said were that bad. but they just needed some elbow grease. remember, it takes guts to be amazing!
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The origin of 'dark DNA' begins to make more sense through this sort of lens, except the system somehow maintained a level of compensation to fix all its flaws.
We do as well, it's called bankruptcy. Not every company survives but in the end the ones that do are more resilient.