Comment by LeFantome
20 hours ago
Completely agree. LLMs are amazing for side projects.
The other place they are amazing is in working with legacy code bases. I mean, the kind the dev team always wants to throw away. First, even if you do want to throw it away, you can first find out what it does and realize it does more than you think it does. You can also create integrations to more modern components which can be used to extend it. You can also create a pretty decent test suite if you do not have one. And, once the behaviour has good test coverage, you can re-write it into something more modern. You can even completely change the architecture while ensuring compatible external behaviour. Remember, this is all in place of “throw it away and start over from scratch, only to discover that the scope is much larger than expected”.
You could already do all of that. Like, none of that is infeasible to achieve on a scale of weeks in most cases.
It’ll still take weeks with AI in the picture, but for some reason management is more willing to plan it when they also have the additional token bills to pay.
It was often not organizationally feasible because you needed permission to spend those weeks up front, instead of working on something else, just to get to where you knew enough to give approval to finish the work.
Now, you can make enough progress with one developer’s quiet afternoon to be confident and finishing the work also takes less time.
The technical grasp of the legacy codebase was a factor, but often not the largest.