Item — HN Reader

"...never fix a running thing. Replace it.

AI pushes this premise beyond infrastructure and into application code itself. When rewriting is cheap, editing in place becomes risky. Mutation accumulates entropy. Replacement resets it."

I've always found verifying some code works correctly much harder and time consuming than writing code. Replacing big chunks code means much _more_ verification and validation.

When you see a bug, and you "fix the running thing" you only need to verify what you changed.

This is the major part of her argument I didn't understand.

As I see it, the "infra as code" transition means going from more ad-hoc changes to less. Predictable, auditable.

Using LLMs to replace mostly-working code with a new, nondeterministically different version seems entirely different to me. You've identified a problem in the code, great, let's rewrite it from spec. Now it fixed the problem! But did it introduce more problems? Hope you used enough tokens, I guess!