It won’t be cheaper for long. It creates a ton of bugs and outright removed features. Without real devs to fix it, companies who replace devs with AI will be left with products that simply don’t work in a matter of months.
Absolutely, but cheaper now is all that matters to the Dunning-Kruger c-suit that runs every business. Besides, they might have already moved on to a different company by the time it becomes a problem, so why should they care?
Pretty much this. The business model now is create your killer app with AI, get it to where it JUST works, then sell the whole company to a bigger fish that has devs that can fix things. Rinse and repeat.
The codebase is large, or you have files with thousands of lines of code? Because there’s a big difference. AI agents are perfectly able to work with large codebases, but they do have problems with large files (which usually are a sign of terrible code).
AI can code better than most humans? BS. Only takes a few features to end up with spaghetti.
In my experience it doesn’t even take a few features, a medium-size non-trivial script by Claude would not pass review by me without human cleanup.
It doesn’t have to be better, just cheaper.
It won’t be cheaper for long. It creates a ton of bugs and outright removed features. Without real devs to fix it, companies who replace devs with AI will be left with products that simply don’t work in a matter of months.
Absolutely, but cheaper now is all that matters to the Dunning-Kruger c-suit that runs every business. Besides, they might have already moved on to a different company by the time it becomes a problem, so why should they care?
Pretty much this. The business model now is create your killer app with AI, get it to where it JUST works, then sell the whole company to a bigger fish that has devs that can fix things. Rinse and repeat.
You tried adding stuff to a spaghetti code base or tried fixing bugs? Half the time you need to rewrite it. It’s not cheaper, you just pay more later.
If it’s cheaper this financial quarter then they don’t care if they have to pay for it the next financial quarter. That’s a future problem!
Do you know why software gets expensive?
I wonder if some bolognese would make it a little bit better… I’ll see myself out
The same is true of most software built by humans, and AI is able to refactor, if you ask it to.
Not in my experience.
Skill issue :shrug:
Context issue.
My code base is so large the agent collapses mid way over these kinds of tasks.
The codebase is large, or you have files with thousands of lines of code? Because there’s a big difference. AI agents are perfectly able to work with large codebases, but they do have problems with large files (which usually are a sign of terrible code).
For an idea, we have over 150 gradle modules. Most modules range 3-20 kotlin files, with the older ones and new important ones reaching +100 files.
Copilot often chokes doing grep when finding what files to work on. Then again when a minute change spans more than 20 files.
My experience with my hobbies projects is much better, or when writing new code on big project that I don’t need to stick to existing code standards.
It’s a very narrow scenario where it does what I need and I actually save time.