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b112 3 hours ago

It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort.

Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far Opus just seems to fall into them again and again. I guess the best way to put it, is that it's not an architect. I sees no big picture, and that's not really a surprise with (compared to a human) an incredibly small context window. When I'm on a project, or working with a codebase, I often have years of "context window". And I have a career of "don't do this" context window.

So what I wonder is, will this be resolved? Will that awareness of larger scope be solved? If that happens, we'll be in another ballpark of competency.

Some companies have massive codebases. Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases, a swiss cheese effect, which eventually will result in collapse? Because I've worked where a bad hire had just this effect over time. And what I worry about isn't using Claude to speed one up, it's the DEV that uses Claude and just "meh" and submits because it passes regression + other tests, and then a manager or code reviewer uses Claude and "meh" because it's a pass too.

ACCount37 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases?

Yes!

And that "yes" holds regardless of whether they use AI or not.

Let's not pretend tech debt accumulation is somehow an AI problem. Some of the world's biggest companies routinely ship code that reeks of years of rot and decay.

layer8 12 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure.

I’m overall skeptical as well, but the argument about tech debt is more nuanced than your comment implies.

asdf88990 a few seconds ago | parent [-]

> This is usually due to time pressure and cost. AI arguably substantially reduces that kind of pressure.

This is categorically false because time and cost pressure is relative and if anything AI has exacerbated the exceptions for ROI and Turn Around time.

This along with the fact that even state of the art AI tends to generate subpar (albeit working) code extremely fast and large volume.

You can see the effect of this already in the increase rate of production incidents recently.

This isn’t to say that AI is useless, but the tech debt it generates is unprecedented.