alt Hacker NewsI don't disagree with the article but it may give some readers the impression that pre-AI hand-written code wasn't fragile.
Here's the famous commentary about Oracle RDBMS codebase of 25 million lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
Every big company codebase with millions of lines devolves into a similar state. The small codebase starts with clean conceptual integrity. It then inevitably decays into incomprehensible spaghetti code as more people are added to it. Various reasons for it including the later devs caring less about the code than the initial team of devs, deadlines, avoiding refactoring because of fear about breaking things, etc.
If you don't want AI to create fragile code, you have to apply the same quality gates that would have been applied to pre-AI hand-written code to keep everything clean. Most companies don't do that.
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So the argument is that because before AI some code was bad it's ok that now all code is bad?
> Every big company codebase with millions of lines devolves into a similar state.
Not really? A lot of companies have comparable codebases that are kept in check.
Service-oriented architecture helps at this scale by forcibly creating boundaries.