Building in the physical world has physical and time constraints that cannot be overcome, which is one of the reasons architecture (and engineering) are so important in this domain. In software development these constraints were only inherent when people were writing the majority of the software. I feel like I’m seeing what I thought were fundamental constraints being eroded by the increasing speed and correctness of these tools and it’s making me reconsider the importance of some of the values that are held by software engineering.
It’s obviously dependent on the domain and solution, but if your software can be extremely rapidly rearranged, bugs found and fixed with little effort, and features added with only a minimum prompt, I think the entire definition of technical debt has changed. I’ve been sceptical of these tools and still approach their output with caution. I also worry that, as a software developer, if more can be accomplished in less time there will be less room on this planet for software developers.
This very well summarizes my current thinking on the subject as well. And most of my career has been playing the role of technical debt nazi. Much to the detriment of my earning potential.
Does AI make incredibly inefficient code most of the time? Yup. But it does it at lightspeed with minimal effort.
I think many software engineers forget they exist to get real things done (in many cases at least) and they are a cost center for most businesses. If your end product is not selling software, very few people actually Doing the Thing(tm) will give a single solitary care about code quality or maintainability when they can just spend 30 minutes and $15 worth of tokens to fix it.
It won't take over everything, but I've already seen otherwise very intelligent go-getter type folks who are not technical or know how to code made extremely useful things for themselves and their small little enterprises. And this will seemingly only get better and more efficient.
For someone who really does love the idea of well architected and future-proof code this is just icky to even say or consider. But I'm coming around to this is the future for the majority of software for most places. And it may have the ability to seriously even the playing field for small enterprises in some industries.
I'm currently using it to implement a zillion side projects at home I've been "meaning to get to" for years. It makes incredibly silly unmaintainable code most of the time - but I learned to not care, and just tell the AI bot to fix it/add to it as I go along. Worst-case I spend a single night deleting it all and starting from zero to "refactor" an entire thing.