alt Hacker Newsironically, AI is also making us create a new whole new level of technical debt - where _no one_ has actual understanding of the code being written and we're just trusting the machine
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the worst case for this is if that doesnt cause sufficient problems to force a reckoning. it has to hurt badly enough that we put significant effort into training legibility into the process.
I like to think of it as a new abstraction layer on top of something we've been comfortable with for years. The developers of the past had to trust that human-readable code would compile to the machine-level bytecode they were used to write, and that even though it wasn't as efficient as they could make it, one day the benefits would outweigh the negatives. Today most developers don't understand compilers well enough to even begin questioning if the code doesn't work because the compiler has a bug or because their code has a bug. They have to trust the abstraction layer beneath their current domain, and they have to find ways to prove that their work is correct in that domain (e.g., writing a sufficient number of unit- and integration tests, compiling with different compilers to different targets, etc.).
We, too, have to adjust to this change, this new abstraction layer, because whether we like it or not, the code an LLM will produce in no more than five years will arguably be much, much better than the code any 10x developer could produce even if given months of time and an infinite supply of caffeine.
We "just" need to find a way to confirm that our work in this new abstraction layer - primarily prompt engineering - results in the code functionality that we had in mind, not necessarily the code implementation that we had in mind.
Yup. Feels very much it's creating a mess on purpose IMHO.
It's like an over-eager junior engineer that will implement whatever pattern they read about last week. It just doesn't feel trained on high-quality enterprise, battle-hardened codebases.
Even Opus 5.5 on High thinking still littered a root directory of a JS project with source files without thinking to put it in a 'src' directory. It had to be told to use a testing framework. Had to be told to also test with Firefox (the project already had established Chrome /and/ Firefox targets).
I have to continuously burn tokens and effort correcting it.
I imagine it performs a bit better with a huge corpus of architecture and style guides. But I did expect to get some that for free with the "leading" model.
Indeed, and it's just going to end up as a zero-sum game where the winner is the one who can most adeptly manipulate the machine to cause harm to the other.