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We’re heading for a world of terrible code that can only be maintained by extremely good coding agents and are pretty much impossible for a human to really understand.

The days of the deep expert, who knew the codebase inside out and had it contained in their head, are coming to an end.

3 comments

  > We’re heading for a world of terrible code that can only be maintained by extremely good coding agents and are pretty much impossible for a human to really understand.

I once figured out the algorithm of the program written in one-instruction ISA. I think the instruction was three-address subtraction.

In my opinion, you overestimate the ability of coding agents to, well, code and underestimate the ability of humans to really understand code.

The chart in the article we discuss appears to plateau if one excludes sample from 2024-07. So, we are not quite heading, we are plateauing, if I may.

that was the exception not the rule

Probably more like the long tail of software - software that was created for a particular purpose in a particular domain by a single person in the company who also happened to know programming - maybe just as Excel macros.

I strongly assume the long tail is shifting and expanding now and will eventually mostly be software for one-off purposes authored by people who don't know how to code, and probably have a poor understanding of how it actually works.

Hm, yes, it makes sense. If AI "makes" software more and more composable, then yes, most software will be thin wrapper on some ancient machinery that no one understands :)

I guess in some sense this is already the case. Most developers are not "full stack" (and the job postings that describe a software MacGyver are ridiculed like clockwork), but with AI this is actually becoming more and more possible (and thus normal, or at least normalized). And of course software is eating the world, including itself, so the common problems are all SaaS-ified (and/or FOSS-ified), allowing AI-aided development to offload the instrumental dependencies.

Then this is an era of snake oil because customers aren’t going to put up with that shit for long.

They’ve been putting up with crappy software for two decades(at least).

Crappy software that works. Unfortunately for all clanker evangelists, you need humans to review all the clanker spaghetti, manage infra, do firefighting and translate business requirements into working systems (gross oversimplification of what that entails). Just code review alone takes up a huge toll on our bandwidth.

Five decades but I’m talking about an unprecedented degree of crappiness.