Literally just last week I was showing several dev teams how to cut days out of their troubleshooting time by using an APM that can capture debug snapshots from production. Combine with source indexing during builds and code versioned with the Git commit id and you can jump to the line of code with the issue in about a minute. You’ll see the stack variables and everything. This is possible even in a distributed microservices monstrosity.
It takes like a day to wire this up.
“We’re too busy for that today, there’s an issue in production!”
But the reality we've discovered is that there's a constant gravitational force pulling most dev orgs to keep increasing complexity, forever, much faster than the actual product increases in complexity. We can avoid this at the individual level, maybe the team level, but at this point it feels unavoidable at the company or industry level
Though AI can help people understand and locate code snippet, which is very helpful to newcomers to a project.
I’m hopeful AI can help all of us really tackle legacy software - rebuild it to be simpler, more secure, well tested and easier to maintain and iterate.
I kind of view companies and governments as super intelligences unto themselves. Capable of doing things individuals are not. That is what AI will be competing with and/or augmenting.