Comment by protocolture
5 hours ago
>I have a feeling that the fallout from this phase of the industry is going to be an exotic form of technical debt that is remarkable mostly in its enormity.
This.
I feel like it is going to become illegal for older engineers to retire until its all cleaned up. When the debt catches up its going to be civilisation level problem, like asbestos or lead.
Illegal? Get fucked. They will retire and you can deal with the mess, you have AI.
When you can no longer pay off technical debt, you turn to technical bankruptcy: start over from scratch, greenfield.
I predict what will happen is eventually the number of technical bankruptcies will rise, and there will be some new movement to only build codebases that fit within human heads, no AI required. This means no more architecture astronauts or code bases where you spiral around massive abstractions just to implement simple features. I look forward to this, as it will become a sort of competition between engineers to see who can do the most with the least amount of new code.
>Illegal? Get fucked. They will retire and you can deal with the mess, you have AI.
Considering the balance of my job is cleaning up technical debt, that's my own retirement I am worried about.
>When you can no longer pay off technical debt, you turn to technical bankruptcy: start over from scratch, greenfield.
What that looks like in say, 2030, I can only guess. We saw this happen to a multinational shipping company due to cryptolocker, but I dont know if theres going to be any interest in replicating that. Certainly the AI barking in the ear of the CEO isnt going to recommend it.
>I predict what will happen is eventually the number of technical bankruptcies will rise
Outside of industries required for national security maybe.
> there will be some new movement to only build codebases that fit within human heads, no AI required.
I suspect that rational governments are probably going to require No AI clauses in their tenders, but that we will also get hundreds of high profile "Whoops we used AI in this contract when we shouldn't" scandals that come to nothing.