Comment by mjr00

1 day ago

It's interesting to look at what was being attempted when the vulnerability was introduced[0]

> Workflows like jira_close.yml use deprecated atlassian JIRA actions and have a dependency on the gh-actions repo. This is not ideal and unecessarily complex. PR updates jira_close workflow to use direct API calls via curl. It preserves custom fields used too.

I won't speak to this projects' management and how they prioritize things, but from my own experience, pre-AI, this type of change would have been firmly in the "this is a minor annoyance, put it in the Tech Debt Backlog alongside the 50000 other tickets" and never actually done. The cost of a human investing the time understanding how to fix the problem, doing code changes, testing them, and deploying them is just way too high for what actual value this change brings, which is close to nothing.

Now with AI, it's as simple as firing up an agent and telling them to make a change; as much effort as writing that backlog Jira ticket in the first place.

Similar to the problem open source is having with low-value PRs, companies are going to have to start realizing that code is not free to review or maintain, even when it's generated for ~free, in their internal processes. Just because an agent can fix a minor tech debt annoyance with a few lines of instructions doesn't mean it should.

[0] https://github.com/snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net/pull/...

I have seen plenty of "my backlog has never been shorter" comments here.

I'm interested in how that turns out 6 months later.

In my team, we have plenty of enhancement requests from users. We address those that make obvious sense and are trivial to do but withhold from others, even though the code change itself is likely small. Because we don't know if there is more than a single user that can actually benefit from it, if it has unintended consequences, or if it causes maintainence issue down the road.

  • > I'm interested in how that turns out 6 months later.

    That really is the real question, isn't it?

    For me it has been a mixed bag so far, I've seen some companies use this tech in a slow and deliberate manner to do what they were already doing but a little bit faster. I've also seen hail Mary passes where the whole codebase was turned over to agents to go wild on with an undersized team and little to no QA. Time will tell...

  • > but withhold from others, even though the code change itself is likely small.

    Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.

    • What you're describing as "gatekeeping" is actually Product Ownership and should be applauded, because the alternative is a product owner who abdicates responsibility to the customer.

    • This describes a product with no vision or purpose.

      People have to take 'no' for an answer sometimes, even if they don't accept it. You can't really 'gatekeep' your own product.

    • Lots of responses to a comment I explicitly did not make. Let me try and spell it out for you folks:

      demand was suppressed by an access bottleneck, the bottleneck is gone, expect a magnitude of change proportional to how much demand was actually pent up rather than proportional to how much programmers currently think was reasonable to deny.

      Explicit things I am not saying: gatekeeping was bad, feature creep is good or desirable, etc. etc. etc.

      1 reply →

    • Can you explain to all of us how this gatekeeping is actually bad? Software would be way, way worse if we just allowed any arbitrary feature to be added to software, and ordinary people who want all the things would have to learn, the hard way, that doing all the things is not actually good.

      1 reply →

    • And the software without gatekeepers will be regarded as confusing and complicated or buggy.

      The work to go from software to usable software system is vast.

    • Knock yourself out and change the world, absolutely nobody is stopping you. That you haven’t already does tell us something though.

    • > Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.

      I assume the "gatekeeping" decision to not implement a feature request is coming from someone responsible for the product, not from a developer.

It's completely mad and has the hallmark of an AI generated change, always eager to change one more thing.

>companies are going to have to start realizing that code is not free to review or maintain

What do you mean, we have both Claude and Cursor review our CC PRs. /s