We were already rushing and churning products and code of inferior quality before AI (let's e.g. consider the sorry state of macOS and Windows in the past decade).

Using AI to ship more and more code faster, instead of to make code more mature, will make this worse.

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simonw 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I want to use AI to ship more and more code faster and better. If AI means our product quality goes down we should figure out better ways to use it.

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slopinthebag 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Shouldn't you want to ship less code that does more? Since when was LoC the relevant benchmark for engineering?

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simonw 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

Less code isn't as important as it used to be, because the cost of maintaining (simple) code has gone down as well.

With coding agent projects I find that investing in DRY doesn't really help very much. Needing to apply the same fix in two places is a waste of time as a human. An agent will spot both places with grep and update them almost as fast as if there was just one.

It's another case where my existing programming instincts appear to not hold as well as I would expect them to.

	▲	slopinthebag 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When you talk about maintaining code, do you mean having the LLM do it and you maintain a write-only codebase? Because if you're reading the code yourself and you have a bloated tangled codebase it would make things much harder right? Is the goal basically a codebase where your interactions are mediated through an LLM?

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coldtea 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm betting on it meaning the product quality going down - and technical debt increasing, which will be dealt with more AI in a downward spiral. Meanwhile college CS majors wont ever bother learning the basics (as AI will handle their coursework, and even their hobby work). Then future AI will train on previous AI output, with the degredation that brings...