I am doing this now with a massive internal app. Our internal customers see this as a drop-in performance because one of the senior team members, me, is not adding new features. But we are addressing a massive technical debt in about one-fifth the time it would've taken without the use of LLMs.
As we’ve seen happening in the open source projects with the piles of bugs being reported to them so much of what’s going on doesn’t seem to be new features, but just longstanding technical debt coming to the fore.
Maybe AI can’t write that new feature for us really fast. Maybe we asked. Maybe the code was complete garbage and it made it clear we really don’t want to keep piling on top of it and need to fix the issues we’ve known about for a long time. Adding new features at the old pace was a problem. We can’t handle the new.
Between that and the fact that some kinds of tech debt are much easier to pay off now that’s where a lot of our “new capacity” is going. Shoring things up.
In the old days we rewrote for a gain in productivity by humans or a gain in performance which resulted in non-trivial dollars. If AI is writing and testing the code, what benefits are you getting from the rewrite?
Fixing performance bottlenecks caused by bad architecture. Fixing bad architecture so that we can ship even faster in the future.
Since AI has gotten good, I've also done some of the rewrites to fix the past lack of budget/planning, hubris or sometimes devs who didn't know any better.
And worse, they're right - developing a feature can increase baseline profits more and faster than rewriting some old code can. The effects of software quality and the like are long-term.
But I can almost guarantee that all the unicorn companies we've seen in the past decades, the now trillion dollar companies, didn't become that because of code quality or diligence.
The core Dropbox idea was clearly good. But in order for it to really be a multi-billion dollar business it needed a platform that would support lots of users. Postgres: a pretty good idea. But it needs an underlying OS that provides things like processes and storage. iPhone: cool idea, made possible entirely by hard won engineering gains in processing efficiency, battery tech, touchscreen tech, cellular network buildout, etc etc.
Not literally everything can be product/profit thinking. There is a lot of engineering work underlying great products that yielded tremendous profits.