AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by eithed on Thursday November 05, 2026 @01:32PM (#50382642)

I don't think I agree that simple is hard. Simple takes effort. Simple requires that you have agency. Simple has all the information available. Simple means that you're accountable for something. I'll be cynical here - it's sooooo much easier to say: this is how it was when I arrived here, it's not my problem, what will I get out of this, somebody told me to do it like this. And nothing in the above is LLMs fault! Well, unless at least now you can say - something did it like that! It's not my fault, it's what LLM told me to do.

Anyhow, apologies for being glum and straying away from the topic, but I also wanted to make a comment that is unlikely to be seen :) the bile comes from personal experience and is not directed towards anyone

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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by rmunn on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:44PM (#50386218)

When you say "simple takes effort", that's kind of what I meant by "simple is hard". It takes work, it takes looking at the problem for a long time (Kepler studied orbits for years) until you understand it well enough to have the epiphany that lets you reduce the complexity down to "oh wait, orbits are ellipses and that solves everything!". Since you preceded your statement that "simple takes effort" with a disagreement about simple being hard, I wonder what you thought I meant by "simple is hard".

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