Comment by JohnBooty

Thats badass! I like doing that kind of work, but I got very jaded about it over the years, because management generally acted as if the engineers took a shit on the conference table in the middle of a Zoom call with their most important customer whenever anybody attempted to address technical debt, as opposed to delivering more more more features. Unless it was billable agency work, in which case they’d hate it even more.

With massive amounts of effort and strong communication it was usually possible to get some tech debt time, but management acted like they were doing YOU a huge favor. It was kind of a career killer, generally.

Alternatively it was possible to get this kind of work done on my own time… but that’s a marriage killer instead of a career killer.

I burned out on trying after decades.

The fun thing is: I don't think this will change that much with AI in the mix ;)

Shitty devs without AI are slowly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.

Shitty devs with AI are much more fasterly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.

I have a similar experience as yours, just add another 10-ish years to the timeline. Literally my first job out of uni, I got to work on a legacy code base that was another 15 years older than that which had a ton of reports all built differently over time with slight variations in both code and end user output that really all wanted to be "the same" both on the code and end user side. So I slowly but surely, one user/PM requested change at a time would build out a common layer of abstractions and shared code that both made the code shared and easier to maintain (great for me!) and consistent for users (great for the PM/users).

Heck, I built a rudimentary TransactSQL parser that'd output stored procedure call graphs to graphviz and then I printed it and hung it on the wall to get through all this and having an LLM to just make a mermaid out of this in 5-ish minutes would definitively have been faster than I was ;)

With an LLM all of that would just have been faster to do but still worthwhile and useful on both levels. I.e. both code abstraction/reuse and PM/user level. Similarly there was a report that one of the devs had to actually run manually and it took him a full week, so users that wanted the report would only request it once a year-ish. When I was asked to learn how to run it from him I was appalled and just took that week to put it into a script that we ran and emailed the report out once a month automatically. They ran that report manually like that for like 10 years prior to that :mindblown:

None of this is an "AI thing". It's a good dev vs. not so good dev thing. And none of it really has to do with coding as in "writing source code" as much as "solving problems for humans" somehow and the "language" you do that in changes over time. If you're the guy that's tied up with the particular language: yeah LLMs are gonna eat your lunch. If you're the problem solver type that uses whatever tools they have available, you're still in demand.

Sure. If you get pleasure in fixing really badly broken shite, there’s tons of opportunity for that, but no money in it. Only money in new features, which is why the codebase is what it is. I have, on rare occasion, been the fixit guy called in temporarily to fix another teams work or get it out the door: that was fun. Short lived , but fun.