I feel like AI might let us model some of the things that we initially didn't scope that led to these problems (e.g. "Decided not to fix every bug, or upgrade every dependency") - being able to more easily ask a system that can dig into "how much time are we spending on stuff related to foo"

AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't make decisions that have these same tail effort profiles. That can be things like building out tooling to handle maintenance updates

I think the real thing that comes out of AI tooling is probably that the tooling needs to be trained (or steered) towards activities that enhance human attention management.

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yurishimo 3 days ago | parent [-]

> AI tooling can also be a place where we start building our view of what maintainable software practices look like so we don't make decisions that have these same tail effort profiles. That can be things like building out tooling to handle maintenance updates

This has been possible already but from my vantage point, it doesn't look like anyone really did it? Sure, there already exists tons of OSS that is built for this case, even before AI, yet it seems to me to always come back to incentives. IMO, there is no incentive to write maintainable software (and I'm not sure there ever will be one at this pace). Businesses are only incentivized to write enough software to accomplish the task within their own defined SLAs and nothing further. But even that doesn't seem to be a blocker at this point if Github is used as an example.

Good software comes from people who care deeply about solving the problems in way that they are invested in. If your employees don't care about your product, you're already starting on the wrong foot. AI isn't going to incentivize bad-average developers to write better software or a good developer to push back harder against their clueless manager. When they make the decision, AI might help (assuming it doesn't make a bigger mess) but it's not going to reduce technical debt in any meaningful way without a sea change of perspective from product managers around the world.

So far, I just don't see it happening in theory or in practice. I hope I'm proven wrong!

	▲	joshka 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think I have a different perspective on this because I've worked in places that do care about that sort of thing on tools that do focus on those sorts of things. I think the long term incentive for these tools to address tech debt as a goal comes from the AI eval benchmarks trending towards being saturated. The advantages of one tool over another will be in the longer context things. This naturally will tend to start to act as a forcing function for training to focus on the longer tail of software development. A good way of thinking about this is GPT 3.5 was good at dealing well with lines of code and functions, 4 was functions, small apps, 5 seems adept at delivering apps and systems, 6 will be systems and whole enterprised programs of work.