8 ms·

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponent

by spoiler 5mo ago

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it

hypeatei 5mo ago
Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.
  - paulryanrogers 5mo ago
    Email is deterministic and portable. Export to a standard format and import somewhere else.
babelfish 5mo ago
Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
- pydry 5mo ago
  AIs struggle with tech debt as much if not more than humans. Ive noticed that theyre often quite bad at refactoring, also.
- tombert 5mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that will be true with AI as well. No accounting for taste, but part of makes code hard for me to reason about is when it has lots of combinatorial complexity, where the amount of states that can happen makes it difficult to know all the possible good and bad states that your program can be in. Combinatorial complexity is something that objectively can be expensive for any form of computer, be it a human brain or silicon. If the code is written in such a way that the number of correct and incorrect states are impossible to know, then the problem becomes undecidable. I do think there is code that is "objectively" difficult to work with.
  - ahepp 5mo ago
    What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever? I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.
    - eloisant 5mo ago
      It hasn't always been true, it started with rapid development tools in the late 90's I believe. And some people thought they were building "disposable" code, only to see their hacks being used for decades. I'm thinking about VB but also behemoth Excel files.
      - ahepp 5mo ago
        I guess the question is, are the issues not worth fixing because implementing a fix is extremely expensive, or because the improvements from fixing it were anticipated to be minor? I assume the answer is generally a mix of the two.
    - tombert 5mo ago
      I actually think that might actually be a good path forward. I hate self-promotion but I posted my opinions on this last night https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-Pushing-AI-Generated-Code-to-Git https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-... The tl;dr of this is that I don't think that the code itself is what needs to be preserved, the prompt and chat is the actual important and useful thing here. At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.
- nkohari 5mo ago
  Because LLMs are designed as emulators of actual human reasoning, it wouldn't surprise me if we discover that the things that make software easy for humans to reason about also make it easier for LLMs to reason about.
- pylua 5mo ago
  I think someday it will be completely unreadable for humans. Ai will have its optimized form.
- tracerbulletx 5mo ago
  Entropy and path dependence are unavoidable laws of mathematics. Not even evolution can avoid them.

by spoiler 5mo ago

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it

hypeatei 5mo ago

Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)

fragmede 5mo ago
Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.
- paulryanrogers 5mo ago
  Email is deterministic and portable. Export to a standard format and import somewhere else.

babelfish 5mo ago

Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward

pydry 5mo ago
AIs struggle with tech debt as much if not more than humans. Ive noticed that theyre often quite bad at refactoring, also.
tombert 5mo ago
I'm pretty sure that will be true with AI as well. No accounting for taste, but part of makes code hard for me to reason about is when it has lots of combinatorial complexity, where the amount of states that can happen makes it difficult to know all the possible good and bad states that your program can be in. Combinatorial complexity is something that objectively can be expensive for any form of computer, be it a human brain or silicon. If the code is written in such a way that the number of correct and incorrect states are impossible to know, then the problem becomes undecidable. I do think there is code that is "objectively" difficult to work with.
- ahepp 5mo ago
  What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever? I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.
  - eloisant 5mo ago
    It hasn't always been true, it started with rapid development tools in the late 90's I believe. And some people thought they were building "disposable" code, only to see their hacks being used for decades. I'm thinking about VB but also behemoth Excel files.
    - ahepp 5mo ago
      I guess the question is, are the issues not worth fixing because implementing a fix is extremely expensive, or because the improvements from fixing it were anticipated to be minor? I assume the answer is generally a mix of the two.
  - tombert 5mo ago
    I actually think that might actually be a good path forward. I hate self-promotion but I posted my opinions on this last night https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-Pushing-AI-Generated-Code-to-Git https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-... The tl;dr of this is that I don't think that the code itself is what needs to be preserved, the prompt and chat is the actual important and useful thing here. At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.
nkohari 5mo ago
Because LLMs are designed as emulators of actual human reasoning, it wouldn't surprise me if we discover that the things that make software easy for humans to reason about also make it easier for LLMs to reason about.
pylua 5mo ago
I think someday it will be completely unreadable for humans. Ai will have its optimized form.
tracerbulletx 5mo ago
Entropy and path dependence are unavoidable laws of mathematics. Not even evolution can avoid them.