Comment by jayd16
3 hours ago
This is fantasy though.
The reason code takes time to change is not because changing it takes time.
You have to redo all the testing and relearn all the hard fought and underspecified lessons of the previous attempt. That's what takes the time.
Maybe for absolutely massive refactors? But if you've got a good test suite and a capable LLM, most refactors are ... almost enjoyable, now.
I think this is what TFA was getting at -- what was once hard or impossible, and an absolutely massive headache to conceptualise, is now surprisingly simple and straightforward.
I've been able to execute several highly niche, large scale refactors in a production system in the last 6 months, entirely enabled by AI tooling. The kinds of changes that individually by hand would have taken months and you would never get top down approval to do because it would take paid developer time away from client-focused work.
This has stabilised the system, fleshed out unfinished ideas, expanded testing capability, introduced new developer-experience oriented tools, and refactored sensitive systems to be more flexible for future use. Not to mention addressing the kinds of uber-niche tech debt that would take years to bite and months to fix.
It's far from fantasy.
It might depend on your use case. Life threatening bugs in a plane? Your argument holds up.
Letting an llm rewrite your internal todo tool, in another language, better design and up-to-date software stack. Yeah, this is absolutely not a fantasy anymore. We got rid of most SAAS tools in a month. Complete with Keycloak, behind wireguard, pocketbase backend, in our cooperate design with exactly the features we want. It works flawless since day one.