Thread

1. behnamoh · 1790613278 · focus · HN ↗

   This article assumes that this problem did not exist before AI. Especially in large companies like Google, the number of people who actually knew what they were doing was relatively small. The vast majority were just piggybacking on other people's work, which I absolutely hate. At least AI has made this obvious, and the difference between people is now their taste, which, for the majority of people, is bad news.

   1. madspindel · 1790614185 · focus · HN ↗

      This! I work for a company that has several systems that are older than 20 years and no one really knows how they work. We are using AI to actually get insights in how they really works, to be able to rewrite and modernize the applications.

      I can't read the source code since it's 8 million lines of code and written in a programming language I don't know and in a language I don't speak.

      1. chasd00 · 1790615955 · focus · HN ↗

         > I can't read the source code since it's 8 million lines of code and written in a programming language I don't know and in a language I don't speak.

         ^ This is the real world. Some comments talked about how maintainability is king and you just can't keep a mental model together of what the LLM produced. In real life software there is no single person with a mental model of how the system works end to end. In the most ideal scenario you have an architecture diagram, some readme's, and a runbook of how to use the system or get it running in a dev environment. Everything else is manually tracing through mountains of code of wildly varying quality.

         coding harnesses are god sent tools when it comes to analysis and maintainability of existing code bases (including code they have produced).

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