alt Hacker News100% this. Some people are basically adding AI as a dependency for their projects. They no longer understand the code
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Seems to me that if the AI writes the code, then AI can easily copy the code.
I.e. how hard is it to point an AI at a piece of software and say "AI, copy this"?
Seems like sooner or later copying just becomes a matter of spending enough on tokens.
Seems in that world, all significant software projects get copied. That turns software into a commodity loss leader for other business models or an open source project. Similar to the way Chrome works for Google and the way Firefox works.
This has been the experience of everyone making decisions in any company without being the one doing the technical work. It's not a novel concept. It's actually the opposite, compared to technical people running companies.
In many places it's demanded by upper management that devs use AI.. so even if engineers wanted to avoid using it, they would have to meet their quotas.
This is what happens when executives suffer from AI psychosis. They were already impatient, now with AI all they care about is feature velocity.
The faster they can hit that refresh button to see the features, the quicker sales can close the deals for them.
AI has basically sold them to wet dream.
Do you understand every part of your dependencies now, pre-AI?
I see it kind of like baking/cooking. Do you bake your bread from scratch? Do you grow your own wheat and grist your own flour?
I think over reliance on it or not even trying to understand what is happening is a big problem to be sure, but it's certainly not a new problem.
I’m a big proponent of writing simple, understandable code, so I’m playing devil’s advocate here a bit, but: who cares?
A significant (majority?) portion of developers have been shipping JavaScript/node applications for the last decade that contain hundreds of MB to GB of code from god knows where doing god knows what with dependency trees the size of redwoods. It’s not like your average mediocre dev really knew what was going on behind their gluing of frameworks together - at least from what I’ve seen.
If you have remotely competent tech leadership that enforces relatively intelligent patterns (a good one I’ve found is “write everything backend in rust”) you can make AI churn out monstrous amounts of code that… isn’t all that bad? And if you enforce it writing and updating a docs/API.md on every commit/PR you’re probably doing better than 80+% of devs I’ve ever met. Up until a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon to roll up to a new job that was a “legacy” pile of garbage concocted over 20+ years with no comments or API docs and a readme that tells you to ask for help from someone who has been dead for 5 years. At least AI code is full of comments (some of which might even be accurate) and there’s a finite (relatively low!) cost to figuring out “wtf is this doing and how is it doing it”