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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

The amount of tech debt at my last job was soul crushing. Trying to keep your head above water as the bugs keep coming in and features keep getting requested. Trying to balance the needs of 10 different departments all asking for priority. And this is with a team of 50 software engineers. We’re already using AI, but still probably need an order of magnitude improvement to make a real impact. I’m sure it’s coming.

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.

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As an external consultant every time I see this scenario it’s always a group that is too busy digging with shovels to learn how to operate the backhoe.

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!”

Yeah. I think many or most large established codebases/software stacks could be an order of magnitude or two simpler (making them an order of magnitude or two easier to iterate on, in terms of both time and number of devs needed)

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

What’s an APM? Bingle are not helping.

Application performance monitoring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_performance_manage...)

APM generally stands for Application Performance Monitoring - an example is DataDogs APM module[1].

1 - https://www.datadoghq.com/product/apm/

The millions of lines of tech debt combined with the pace our company moves and volumes (high tech manufacturing) would blow your mind. It’s thunder dome.

I had a massive, tanklike ETL I had designed. Over-engineered, really. It was built to keep truckin' as best it could and issue instructions on what was wrong, exactly where, how to fix it, and so on. Missing data? Call one of these three people. Also, here's the file where you update if these people have left. Warnings over errors, errors over terminating. Pored over it, working out edge cases, then corner cases, then situations I was told would "never" happen. Then it was set free like a strandbeest to do its thing, only receiving reports, occasional requests for more data. Finally, something odd came up in warnings, but not in errors, and I was shocked. How did the system handle this? Got a little curious ... I guess I had a good day here and a good day there, because although I currently did not "get it," the program did. My contributions had built something which was not merely consistent, but collectively had become smarter than I for this problem. I think my little process was its own super intelligence in its hyper-specific niche.

Even experienced developers are not trusted when it comes to huge refactor. Nevertheless let AI open a PR with 10000+ lines of changes.

Though AI can help people understand and locate code snippet, which is very helpful to newcomers to a project.

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