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He's not entirely wrong, but here's my take: however sophisticated these AI-built software systems are, no one has shown that they can do what Agile methodology
by lr4444lr 3y ago
He's not entirely wrong, but here's my take: however sophisticated these AI-built software systems are, no one has shown that they can do what Agile methodology brought to the industry: ease of modification to serve changing business needs.
Once the AI sets up the initial data modeling and storage system cross-talk, and it's singing in production with paying customers, how well is it going to continually iterate on that system when non-engineers make asks of it? My guess is, not that well, and worse and worse as the business evolves. Who's going to be able to make sense of the possible hallucinations and spaghetti code nightmare under the hood when things are going too haywire to ignore? Are you going to let it just drop columns being used by active code, while it takes minutes if not hours to rebuild indexes on new ones? Let it design access patterns across 10+ table joins? Make UI decisions that load 100 nested divs for every element in an array because that's how it interpreted the best way to do styling?
Someone's going to blow a company to hell trying to get AI to build and continually run IT, I predict, and it will be a much-remembered case study.
- kijin 3y agoManagers always underestimate the cost of maintaining software, with nasty consequences down the road. There's nothing new about it. It's just another form of technical debt. We're crossing our fingers and hoping that a better AI will come along that knows how to fix that debt before it all blows up.
- JoshTko 3y agoWouldn't a GPT-5 or 6 level AI be even better than agile? A new feature can be digested by AI as part of the new complete set of requirements and the AI can then refactor the entire codebase for each new feature. It can also generate all the net new test cases to add to ensure that there is no regression.
- kragen 3y agothe hard part of modifying existing software is understanding it my limited experience has been that llms are enormously better at explaining existing code (code → text) than at writing new code (text → code)