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> ...and [1] codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and [2] LLMs, too, will have trouble maintainin

> ...and [1] codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and [2] LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. [3] At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. You are a very optimistic person. IMHO, claims #1 & #2 will happen, but #3 won't. People, especially business leaders, will just adjust their expectations downwards (or be forced to do so). Just think of how often some "new and improved version" drops some important feature you used without providing a good replacement? We'll get more of that. If the codebase is unmaintainable, they'll just regenerate a new pile of garbage that will change stuff randomly and call it an improvement.

pydry 4mo ago
We've been on this merry go round before with the "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" boom. That slopfest ended with a new executive dogma of "hire only the best programmers" as so many of those projects were humiliating disasters which had to be junked. I do not think that was coincidental. Executive fashions can remain remarkably consistent and irrational for years as they try to make reality conform to their expectations before doing a complete 180.
- wtfHN26 4mo ago
  Funny you say that. Outsourcing to India never ended. The Indian Service companies kept growing over last two decades. Now many Western companies are setting up Global Capability Centers driving strategic innovation, IT, and R&D. So the work going to India has moved up from "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" to "we will hire the best talent in India directly and set up our company's base there". To give some credit to your point, moving some low efficiency work to India since early 2000s freed up resources for many Tech companies to invest their best programmers into more profitable ventures. But with the GCCs being set up in India, even a lot of the innovation and R&D work is now moving to India. If that's any indication to your parallels with companies investing in AI. Something similar can happen with AI - where low end work moves to AI first, and the over time as the Technology develops more challenging and innovative tasks move to AI.
  - citrin_ru 4mo ago
    Outsourcing never ended but it did happen in waves. Right after ZIRR ended but before the AI panic multiple companies started to layoff in developers in western countries and double down on outsourcing to India. During ZIRP they employed more people in the US/EU and less work was outsourced.
weatherlite 4mo ago
> Just think of how often some "new and improved version" drops some important feature you used without providing a good replacement? We'll get more of that. If the codebase is unmaintainable, they'll just regenerate a new pile of garbage that will change stuff randomly and call it an improvement. Most production systems dont have such a high tolerance for embarrassing bugs. Startups can completely fail if they have too low quality. Established businesses can lose to competition if orders don't arrive, compliance has bugs etc etc. So quality has to be good enough, that's a constraint that wont go away.
- mewpmewp2 4mo ago
  Having worked at a company with thousands of microservices, I feel like most of it is just a bunch of boilerplate riddled with tons of ridiculous business logic, security and otherwise bugs. It seems like people were historically more concerned about Java inheritance and spreading everything around different files and directory hierarchies, while ignoring common sense business requirements completely. With each service being on separate older version, many being very difficult to start up locally, I don't see how LLMs could do worse than that, and that is a profitable, working business. Funnily enough AI is the one discovering all those glaring issues now, and everyone is overwhelmed with getting it fixed. You could allow AI to attempt fixing it, but even though all of it was human written it is still hard to review, and even locally spin up or test because no one any more knows the true business requirements as people have rotated etc, so it's a nightmare. The code on the first sight looks good, but what could be a simple config map, is spread out abstraction that is impossible to understand. Think just massive amounts of boilerplate to make a proxy call to another microservice etc.
  - zingar 4mo ago
    The 1500 line react component that my unsupervised agentic coding side project produced says that it can get worse than we have now.
    - mewpmewp2 4mo ago
      I swear I see far worse from humans for working businesses, and in much worse ways than just duplication of code. At least AI tends to be smarter about React intricacies even if it does create huge files. For my personal projects however I have straight token limits per file, whether it is backend or frontend so AI can't do that many lines of code. And I have specifically token limits so it would avoid hacking with formatting. And for React specifically I force it to put hooks in separate files and component files to be presentational only with max 1 hook usage.

pydry 4mo ago

We've been on this merry go round before with the "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" boom. That slopfest ended with a new executive dogma of "hire only the best programmers" as so many of those projects were humiliating disasters which had to be junked. I do not think that was coincidental. Executive fashions can remain remarkably consistent and irrational for years as they try to make reality conform to their expectations before doing a complete 180.

wtfHN26 4mo ago
Funny you say that. Outsourcing to India never ended. The Indian Service companies kept growing over last two decades. Now many Western companies are setting up Global Capability Centers driving strategic innovation, IT, and R&D. So the work going to India has moved up from "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" to "we will hire the best talent in India directly and set up our company's base there". To give some credit to your point, moving some low efficiency work to India since early 2000s freed up resources for many Tech companies to invest their best programmers into more profitable ventures. But with the GCCs being set up in India, even a lot of the innovation and R&D work is now moving to India. If that's any indication to your parallels with companies investing in AI. Something similar can happen with AI - where low end work moves to AI first, and the over time as the Technology develops more challenging and innovative tasks move to AI.
- citrin_ru 4mo ago
  Outsourcing never ended but it did happen in waves. Right after ZIRR ended but before the AI panic multiple companies started to layoff in developers in western countries and double down on outsourcing to India. During ZIRP they employed more people in the US/EU and less work was outsourced.

weatherlite 4mo ago

> Just think of how often some "new and improved version" drops some important feature you used without providing a good replacement? We'll get more of that. If the codebase is unmaintainable, they'll just regenerate a new pile of garbage that will change stuff randomly and call it an improvement. Most production systems dont have such a high tolerance for embarrassing bugs. Startups can completely fail if they have too low quality. Established businesses can lose to competition if orders don't arrive, compliance has bugs etc etc. So quality has to be good enough, that's a constraint that wont go away.

mewpmewp2 4mo ago
Having worked at a company with thousands of microservices, I feel like most of it is just a bunch of boilerplate riddled with tons of ridiculous business logic, security and otherwise bugs. It seems like people were historically more concerned about Java inheritance and spreading everything around different files and directory hierarchies, while ignoring common sense business requirements completely. With each service being on separate older version, many being very difficult to start up locally, I don't see how LLMs could do worse than that, and that is a profitable, working business. Funnily enough AI is the one discovering all those glaring issues now, and everyone is overwhelmed with getting it fixed. You could allow AI to attempt fixing it, but even though all of it was human written it is still hard to review, and even locally spin up or test because no one any more knows the true business requirements as people have rotated etc, so it's a nightmare. The code on the first sight looks good, but what could be a simple config map, is spread out abstraction that is impossible to understand. Think just massive amounts of boilerplate to make a proxy call to another microservice etc.
- zingar 4mo ago
  The 1500 line react component that my unsupervised agentic coding side project produced says that it can get worse than we have now.
  - mewpmewp2 4mo ago
    I swear I see far worse from humans for working businesses, and in much worse ways than just duplication of code. At least AI tends to be smarter about React intricacies even if it does create huge files. For my personal projects however I have straight token limits per file, whether it is backend or frontend so AI can't do that many lines of code. And I have specifically token limits so it would avoid hacking with formatting. And for React specifically I force it to put hooks in separate files and component files to be presentational only with max 1 hook usage.