LLMs reduced interest on tech debt, but it's still there and people who have a tendency to acquire it will go bankrupt eventually.

"The code market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." will probably be a thing.

That's certainly what I expect to happen. LLMs will ruin your software if you don't hand-hold them, but it'll take time for that to happen. And until that does happen, businesses hell bent on using them won't have anything to push them into realizing what a mistake it was to use them.

Two imagined executive responses:

1. "Nonsense, if it was a code-quality issue from the AI stuff, we'd have seen problems sooner, like in the first few months or a year. Oh, sure, some engineers complained, but that was just an adjustment period because they stopped once we told them we didn't care and mandated that they up-skill into the new AI-centric workflow future."

2. "The bold new AI initiative I put into place can't possibly be wrong, this failure is on the engineers who were responsible for overseeing its operation. This is supremely disappointing because we made their jobs so easy, they no longer have to write code, just review several dozens of pages per day with unremitting paranoid vigilance and attention to detail."

This, plus anyone responsible dodging that as soon as possible via job hopping. Harder to do in the current job market but internal transfers are still available, most of the time.

I was pretty early in the LLM stuff and I got called out on using it back in the day, because I showed the exact symptoms we see now, but as soon as management jumped on the train all the coworkers did a 180 and I alt tabbed out into a different department thinking it would change something... well it didn't :'D

I guess it will take some years till we are sane again or not...

I revisit it to see if the promises are unbroken now from time to time with every other update and these days it doesn't look so good. It is non deterministic all the way down.