One point: yes, you're speaking from the power position. God-mode over a fleet of minions has always been an engineer's wet-dream. That's not even bad per-say. It's the collateral damage down stream that's at issue. Maybe you don't see any damage, but that's largely the point. Is it really up to you to say?

▲

tossandthrow 2 days ago | parent [-]

What is the collateral damage? In ensuring that a bunch of endpoints use the same structure using LLMs?

▲

apsurd 2 days ago | parent [-]

Let's not debate that it's possible to make very large very safe changes. It is possible that you did that.

This is about "slop bias". I'd wager that empowering everyone, especially power-positions to ship 50x more code will produce more code that is slop than not. You strongly oppose this because it's possible for you to update an API?

I'm stuck on the power-position thing because I'm living it. I'm pro-AI but there are AI-transformation waves coming in and mandating top-down. From their green-field position it's undeniable crush-mode killin' it. Maintenance of all kinds is separate and the leaders and implementors don't pay this cost. Maybe AI will address everything at every level. But those imposing this world assume that to be true, while it's the line-engineers and sales and customer service reps that will bear the reality.

▲

tossandthrow 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Maybe AI will address everything at every level.

I think this is the idea you need to entertain / ponder more on.

I largely agree with you, what I don't agree with is the weighting about the individual elements.

My point was that I could do a 30 minutes cleanup in order to streamline hundreds of endpoints. Without AI I would not have been able to justify this migration due to business reasons.

We get to move faster, also because we can shorten deprication tails and generally keep code bases more fit more easily.

In particular, we have dropped the external backoffice tool, so we have a single mono repo.

An Ai does tasks all the way from the infrastructure (setting policies to resources) and all the way to the frontends.

Equally, if resources are not addressed in our codebase, we know at a 100% it is not in use, and can be cleaned up.

Unused code audits are being done on a weekly schedule. Like our sec audits, robustness audits, etc.

▲

apsurd 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, the more I debate the AI-lovers the more I can empathize with the possibility it may very well turn out to be everything is an Agent. Encodable.

I'm not a doomer either, but I do think this arc is a human arc: there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. To your point, Agents with good stewardship can also implement hygiene and security practices.

It's important we surface potential counter metrics and unintended side effects. And even in doing so the unknown unknowns will get us. With that said, I like this positive stewardship framing, I'll choose to see and contribute to that, thanks!

	▲	tossandthrow 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I definitely don't identify as an AI lover. For me year 0 of Ai was February 6th 2026 and the release of Opus 4.6. Until that day we had roughly zero Ai code in the code base (additions or subtractions). So in all reasonable terms I am a late adopter. For code bases Ai does not concern me. We have for quite some time worked with systems that are too complex for single people to comprehend, so this is a natural extension of abstraction. On the other hand, am super concerned about Ai and the society. The impact of human well being from "easy" Ai relations over difficult human connection. The continued human alienation and relational violation (I think the "woke" discourse will go on steroids). I think society is going to be much less tolerant. And that frightens me.