Has this ever happened besides the Y2K fixes?
Wouldn't it be much more likely that the companies will simply go under? Or that they will make a team that writes a completely new version of the code, somewhat like Mac OS X was a replacement of MacOS 9 and not a cleanup.
Isn't that one way of the "cleanup and re-design work"?
Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.
Publications like the Economist or the WSJ that drive a lot of this hype among the investor and executive classes are loath to point out that their readers and owners are the proverbial emperor not wearing any clothes.
One of the benefits of tech unions (if they existed in any meaningful way) would be to point out where the emperor is naked in a way that is a bit harder to ignore than the kerfuffle that occurs inside hacker news threads or subreddits dedicated to experienced devs.
Careful speaking such heresy around here, you might get burned at the stake.
No, seriously. If you have the skills to join, yo should be able to handle the proper way of programming with no AI at all.
All of us are already in tech debt. The post-AI mess won't look significantly different from the pre-AI mess.
If anything I would expect management to throw more money at AI in hopes of fixing the mess (if management even perceives such a mess).
And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI coding, but it often seems to me that people are making fundamental errors when framing the problem.
“But how will humans maintain AI code?” Is one such example. Why would we expect one part (code creation) to change dramatically without all other parts equally undergoing a revolution?
Because due to how complexity works, you reach a state where the expected number of breakages from modifying the code base exceeds the value from the change itself. Even if you assume the cost of labor is 0. It’s like the monkeys writing Shakespeare.
> And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.
If this worked it would have been done every few years at big companies. In reality, prototypes cannot take the place of a legacy system because it’s deeply integrated and depended upon. Most notably through the data it owns, but in many subtle ways as well. Simply verifying that a new system will not break is a massive undertaking. Writing meaningfully testable systems is an order of magnitude harder than implementing them.
When there’s a monetary risk of bugs (lose data, lose users, mess up core business logic etc) companies pay for the confidence to get things right. Doesn’t mean it always works, or that their priorities are right, but a payment vendor is not going to trust vibes to do a db migration.
There are still many experimental prototype domains out there, like indie games and static web sites, where throw away and start over is pretty much fine. But that’s not the entire field.
Another model will translate that very reliably into code.
Other models will assist in testing and checking and fleshing out specs.