Comment by ernsheong
11 hours ago
It seems like Shopify has fallen into a trap thinking that more complexity costs nothing because of AI. In the age of AI we have to embrace the same principle as before that complexity needs to be tamed, not multiplied. Even as humans struggled with complexity, from what I see now AI struggles very much the same. Hence I don't think this will age well.
Another scary thing is with AI it's easy to let complexity get out of hand to the point where a human manually writing code is basically impossible. Even though AI might seem capable of handling the complexity, you'll start noticing all these weird bugs pop up all over your codebase.
I'd say that was even a goal of the AI companies. It's not in their interest to generate human-maintainable code
Always relevant - https://grugbrain.dev/
That was great! But here is one place, at least, that needs to be updated for the AI era:
> working demo especially good trick: force big brain make something to actually work to talk about and code to look at that do thing, will help big brain see reality on ground more quickly
One of the best things about AI is that you can have a working prototype almost instantly, which is great for iterating quickly over ideas. But it means this trick simply doesn’t work anymore.
We should understand the complexity we are adding but having LLMs as a tool does also make managing the complexity easier.
Yeah the problem is AI would improve exponentially and can do work 24/7
any engineering problem is just 'when' and 'how much' at that point
Yeah but engineering is still subject to failure modes, AI can't circumvent that short of formal proofing (which nobody really wants to get into)